Live Lab SEO

Google says the Thanksgiving ranking shuffle is related to the Penguin 3.0 release from six weeks ago. Google has confirmed with us that the shifts and changes reported throughout the industry on Thanksgiving day were a result of the Penguin 3.0 refresh that first began rolling out 6-weeks ago. Google told us in response to what we saw on Thanksgiving day, “the Penguin rollout is ongoing, and this is just the effect of that.” The interesting part was that Google began the rollout of Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014, which was 45 days ago, or over six-weeks ago. For this to still be rolling out is unusual, I would think. In addition, many sites that reported changes on that Thanksgiving, only saw recoveries. Meaning, it looked like somewhat of a reversal of the Penguin 3.0 rollout that happened in October. But the results from what happened over Thanksgiving is still unclear. The Penguin 3.0 rollout initially impacted about 1% of queries, with this Thanksgiving occurrence, I

Ranking First Is Good, But First With Prerender Is Better... How do you know when you've got a strong hold on the #1 ranking? Contributor Gene McKenna shows how Google Chrome may provide a clue. So you thought ranking #1 for a search was as good as you could get, right? How about ranking #1 with a strong indicator that your position there is pretty solid? A new browser optimization in search results might be giving us that clue. Starting around August 26th, our in-house analytics system at Groupon started reporting a big increase in homepage views. It’s rare for a search marketing team to complain about too much traffic, but all this new traffic was coming only from the Chrome browser, arriving only at our homepage, and much of it was bouncing, it was killing our revenue-per-session metrics, and all of it was from SEO (Organic Search). And this “Chrome Home” traffic, as we called it, kept growing and growing — until, by September 25th, we had tens of thousands of add