April 16, 2014 at 14:34Behavioral Ranking Factors: Big Data Technologies in SEO
The SEO market is moving from simple services to Big Data technologies, which makes it even more interesting. Imagine: a user just came to your site, and you already know everything about him - from interests, to the budget and delivery address. Getting the user you need, you improve the performance of your site in the SERP. This is the technological result of the “arms race” between SEO professionals and search engines.
Recently, the approach to search promotion has changed dramatically. This happened because the search engines themselves changed the ranking algorithms of sites in the search results. New, sophisticated algorithms require the use of large amounts of data and new technologies in order for website promotion to be effective.
Over the past year, SEO professionals have seen the following literally revolutionary changes:
1. Behavioral and social ranking factors come to the fore.
2. Textual factors fade into the background.
What does it mean? And the fact that the good old ways of promoting keywords is no longer "key." Texts in the style of “A seoshnik came to a bar, restaurant, cafe, Moscow entertainment” have long been no longer a way to raise a website in the search results, but, on the contrary, a sure way to “drown” it. So, to promote your site, the good old copywriter will no longer help you. The “arms race” between search engines and SEO professionals will be won by the first to master BigData.
What's happening? Due to changes in ranking algorithms, now sites that would never have been there before fall into the TOP, namely:
1. Sites with short texts. A sheet of text can now only do harm.
2. In the texts of the site there is only one occurrence of a key phrase or even synonyms - and this is enough.
3. Sites that use the output of content on AJAX or generally only for authorized users.
These sites were in the top for a reason. The new website ranking strategy has allowed search engines to rank higher-quality and relevant sites in the top, and, accordingly, weed out "SEO" spam. But if the ranking now does not depend directly on keywords, then what does it depend on? What signals does the search engine “read” now before putting the site in a specific place in the search engine and how can we now influence it?
The way the user behaves on the site, how and where he comes from, whether he returns, regularly supports the site on social networks - these and many other factors make up the so-called layer of behavioral factors, which, recently, almost begin to play key role in ranking for search engines. Obviously, a similar amount of information about each user can only be processed using the latest technological advances, in particular - BigData.
And if search engines use new and complex technologies, SEO professionals must offer you mechanisms that can also analyze a huge number of behavioral factors and effectively influence them, as the SERPClick.ru service does, for example., which was launched in December and now daily carries out the promotion of behavioral factors for several thousand customers.
So, today site optimization includes the skillful management of natural behavioral factors. How to safely influence these factors?
You need to "just" place the site for all thematic requests in the special. placement of Yandex and Google for at least a year. If you can get more targeted traffic than the leaders, then after a fairly long period of time it will raise the site in the search results.
And although it’s difficult to make mistakes in such an advance, its price will be extremely high: from several hundred thousand to millions of dollars. The search engines themselves promoting this method of website promotion argue that, for example, in the case of Yandex, people should invest in Direct even at a loss, taking into account the understanding of all repeat sales and the growth of the company's capitalization (Client Lifetime Value will be significantly less than the Direct cost). Which is partly true. But expensive.
It turns out that if you are a market leader in your topic and you already have a lot of traffic, then it may just be enough for you to create a site with good conversion and you will be guaranteed to remain in the TOP. Or - spend a huge budget on promotion through specials. search engines themselves. But if it’s far from leadership, then there’s nowhere to go, and you’ll have to fight over behavioral factors. But as?
There is another approach: try to influence behavioral factors by engaging the audience in other ways. Previously, “wraparounds” were simply used for this. As we recall, the first systems generated bots that performed the necessary actions in search results and on promoted sites. But search engines have begun introducing systems that can weed out such a promotion and make it useless, ineffective, and even harmful.
In response, the optimizers switched from robotic “cheats” to distributing tasks to all users in a row, which still works well for promotion, but taking into account the reasonable use of technology.
As a result, now the market of behavioral factors began to develop dynamically, and behavioral services began to remotely resemble the good old link exchanges. ServiceSERPClick.ru , which I mentioned earlier, just allows you to effectively and, in my opinion, much more profitable to influence behavioral factors for ranking the site in the SERP.
Obviously, in response to the spread of such services, search engines will strike back very soon: simply distributing tasks to live users will lose their effectiveness by improving the anti-spam mechanisms in search engines. This means that, as at the time of cheating, the method of promotion due to the “purchased” users will begin to lose its effectiveness. And this is already starting to happen.
In order for behavioral factors to remain an effective way of promotion, it is necessary not only to bring everyone to the site, but to analyze in detail the profiles of those people who will go to the site from search engines and other resources.
As the head of one of the largest SEO holdings, understanding this situation at the beginning of 2013, I decided to invest heavily in technological platforms for processing and collecting large amounts of data about user profiles, machine learning mechanisms for recognizing interests and predicting user needs, as well as RTB .
As a result of these actions, we now offer solutions and services that can effectively improve behavioral factors: from the powerful rTarget retargeterto the ProfitTask job distribution system through which SocialTask , SERPClick and MegaIndex work .
Every day we get more and more information about user profiles, which prompted me to create a separate technology project that will collect, process and provide information about user profiles. This project will aggregate data on hundreds of millions of users, which will be built on the basis of tens of billions of information signals. For a number of users, we will know their accounts on social networks, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, name, etc ...
I would not start this project in the public domain, if I had not seen the potential opportunities for webmasters to increase conversion. Imagine a new visitor just comes to your site and you already know everything about him:
• what is his budget
• what products to show him
• what he likes
• what he thinks
• where to deliver to him
And if he doesn’t buy, you can catch up him by SMS, e-mail or banner. The project will be launched before the end of April, as soon as all technological solutions are debugged to the level of mass product.
Actually, these opportunities will make it possible to significantly influence behavioral factors, attracting exactly the audience that will lead to an improvement in ranking.
We are actively researching social graphs and user behavior patterns on social networks. Based on the large amount of user data, we are already significantly increasing the impact on social factors.
More than a year of the product’s existence on the impact on social signals in the search ranking of guru.megaindex.ru , several thousand customers began to use it. In the near future, the market for systems for influencing social ranking factors will also become quite large.
Recently, the approach to search promotion has changed dramatically. This happened because the search engines themselves changed the ranking algorithms of sites in the search results. New, sophisticated algorithms require the use of large amounts of data and new technologies in order for website promotion to be effective.
Over the past year, SEO professionals have seen the following literally revolutionary changes:
1. Behavioral and social ranking factors come to the fore.
2. Textual factors fade into the background.
What does it mean? And the fact that the good old ways of promoting keywords is no longer "key." Texts in the style of “A seoshnik came to a bar, restaurant, cafe, Moscow entertainment” have long been no longer a way to raise a website in the search results, but, on the contrary, a sure way to “drown” it. So, to promote your site, the good old copywriter will no longer help you. The “arms race” between search engines and SEO professionals will be won by the first to master BigData.
What's happening? Due to changes in ranking algorithms, now sites that would never have been there before fall into the TOP, namely:
1. Sites with short texts. A sheet of text can now only do harm.
2. In the texts of the site there is only one occurrence of a key phrase or even synonyms - and this is enough.
3. Sites that use the output of content on AJAX or generally only for authorized users.
These sites were in the top for a reason. The new website ranking strategy has allowed search engines to rank higher-quality and relevant sites in the top, and, accordingly, weed out "SEO" spam. But if the ranking now does not depend directly on keywords, then what does it depend on? What signals does the search engine “read” now before putting the site in a specific place in the search engine and how can we now influence it?
Behavioral factors
The way the user behaves on the site, how and where he comes from, whether he returns, regularly supports the site on social networks - these and many other factors make up the so-called layer of behavioral factors, which, recently, almost begin to play key role in ranking for search engines. Obviously, a similar amount of information about each user can only be processed using the latest technological advances, in particular - BigData.
And if search engines use new and complex technologies, SEO professionals must offer you mechanisms that can also analyze a huge number of behavioral factors and effectively influence them, as the SERPClick.ru service does, for example., which was launched in December and now daily carries out the promotion of behavioral factors for several thousand customers.
So, today site optimization includes the skillful management of natural behavioral factors. How to safely influence these factors?
The first way. Dear
You need to "just" place the site for all thematic requests in the special. placement of Yandex and Google for at least a year. If you can get more targeted traffic than the leaders, then after a fairly long period of time it will raise the site in the search results.
And although it’s difficult to make mistakes in such an advance, its price will be extremely high: from several hundred thousand to millions of dollars. The search engines themselves promoting this method of website promotion argue that, for example, in the case of Yandex, people should invest in Direct even at a loss, taking into account the understanding of all repeat sales and the growth of the company's capitalization (Client Lifetime Value will be significantly less than the Direct cost). Which is partly true. But expensive.
It turns out that if you are a market leader in your topic and you already have a lot of traffic, then it may just be enough for you to create a site with good conversion and you will be guaranteed to remain in the TOP. Or - spend a huge budget on promotion through specials. search engines themselves. But if it’s far from leadership, then there’s nowhere to go, and you’ll have to fight over behavioral factors. But as?
The second way. Smart
There is another approach: try to influence behavioral factors by engaging the audience in other ways. Previously, “wraparounds” were simply used for this. As we recall, the first systems generated bots that performed the necessary actions in search results and on promoted sites. But search engines have begun introducing systems that can weed out such a promotion and make it useless, ineffective, and even harmful.
In response, the optimizers switched from robotic “cheats” to distributing tasks to all users in a row, which still works well for promotion, but taking into account the reasonable use of technology.
As a result, now the market of behavioral factors began to develop dynamically, and behavioral services began to remotely resemble the good old link exchanges. ServiceSERPClick.ru , which I mentioned earlier, just allows you to effectively and, in my opinion, much more profitable to influence behavioral factors for ranking the site in the SERP.
What will happen to the market of behavioral factors next?
Obviously, in response to the spread of such services, search engines will strike back very soon: simply distributing tasks to live users will lose their effectiveness by improving the anti-spam mechanisms in search engines. This means that, as at the time of cheating, the method of promotion due to the “purchased” users will begin to lose its effectiveness. And this is already starting to happen.
How to maintain your position in the new conditions?
In order for behavioral factors to remain an effective way of promotion, it is necessary not only to bring everyone to the site, but to analyze in detail the profiles of those people who will go to the site from search engines and other resources.
As the head of one of the largest SEO holdings, understanding this situation at the beginning of 2013, I decided to invest heavily in technological platforms for processing and collecting large amounts of data about user profiles, machine learning mechanisms for recognizing interests and predicting user needs, as well as RTB .
As a result of these actions, we now offer solutions and services that can effectively improve behavioral factors: from the powerful rTarget retargeterto the ProfitTask job distribution system through which SocialTask , SERPClick and MegaIndex work .
Every day we get more and more information about user profiles, which prompted me to create a separate technology project that will collect, process and provide information about user profiles. This project will aggregate data on hundreds of millions of users, which will be built on the basis of tens of billions of information signals. For a number of users, we will know their accounts on social networks, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, name, etc ...
I would not start this project in the public domain, if I had not seen the potential opportunities for webmasters to increase conversion. Imagine a new visitor just comes to your site and you already know everything about him:
• what is his budget
• what products to show him
• what he likes
• what he thinks
• where to deliver to him
And if he doesn’t buy, you can catch up him by SMS, e-mail or banner. The project will be launched before the end of April, as soon as all technological solutions are debugged to the level of mass product.
Actually, these opportunities will make it possible to significantly influence behavioral factors, attracting exactly the audience that will lead to an improvement in ranking.
And that's not all!
We are actively researching social graphs and user behavior patterns on social networks. Based on the large amount of user data, we are already significantly increasing the impact on social factors.
More than a year of the product’s existence on the impact on social signals in the search ranking of guru.megaindex.ru , several thousand customers began to use it. In the near future, the market for systems for influencing social ranking factors will also become quite large.