Welcome to ‘What Happened in Search’.
Packed full of the week’s search marketing news each Friday, this week we take a look at the searchmetrics SEO winners and losers, Google’s RankBrain and Twitter’s new brand hub.
BATTLEGROUND
addmustard’s SEO team uses searchmetrics to analyse which sites came out on top, and which didn’t fare so well, in last week’s natural search.
Written by our Junior SEO Analyst, Dina Mouhandes, here’s this week’s Battleground.
WINNERS
Spectator ranks as this week’s overall winner in terms of gain: According to the chart, this site saw a sudden decrease in visibility and has increased rapidly this week. It seems when users visit the site, the domain changes from spectator.co.uk to new.spectator.co.uk. Therefore, reason for a sudden decrease and then increase could be because the domain has changed.
Microsoft has seen a sudden increase in visibility. This week, news on a new update for Microsoft Photos has been said to be causing phone facilities to stop working, so increased brand queries could be the cause of this boost.
ucl.ac.uk
UCL, an academic website for University College London, has seen a dramatic increase in visibility. News broke on the University having to pay students compensation of up to £100K from a rat infestation at the residence halls, so again, increased brand searches are the likely reason for this increase.
LOSERS
greenwichmeantime.com
Greenwichmeantime has seen a sudden decrease in visibility. It seems that the site has had a massive drop in ranking for the keyword eBay. A site on the page called “eBay uk selling tips” now shows a non-existing page when clicked on. The decrease could be due to the page being taken down, therefore loosing ranking for the keyword eBay and disappearing off visibility.
This site has seen a sudden decrease in visibility after showing a steady and good position in rankings. There seems to be no issue with the site, so this could merely be a technical issue resulting from either a penalty or changes being made to the side.
Learnmyway has seen a massive drop in visibility. The site has seen sudden increases, then decreased the past few weeks, which may well be due to a technical fault occurring on the site.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This week Bloomberg reported that Google is now using artificial intelligence (AI) in search.
Google senior research scientist Greg Corrado revealed that the system, dubbed ‘RankBrain’, has been working as one its algorithm’s signals for the past few months.
In this short time, Greg said that RankBrain has become the third-most important signal, meaning it contributes significantly to what results are produced from a search query.
‘Ambiguous queries’ – those that Google’s systems have never seen before – are more efficiently interpreted by RankBrain through its ability to guess which words have a similar meaning to those already in its database.
TWITTER’S BRAND HUB
Twitter has launched a Brand Hub – a social listening tool that will serve as an addition to its current analytics offering.
No doubt a further attempt to draw in big brands and their advertising dollars, the service will show marketers audience insights for users talking about their brands as well as share of voice trends.
Exclusively launching with BrandHub is TrueVoice, which determines “your brand’s TrueVoice by first analyzing Tweets about your brand and those about your competitors.
“Then, we identify what percentage of these impressions your brand owns. As consumers see ads about your brand and your competitors on TV, display, and social channels, they send Tweets which are then counted in real time through TrueVoice.”
CHUTE 2.0
Chute, the UGC marketing platform that aims to provide an ‘end-to-end solution for visual search, insights, rights management and publishing’ has built on its technology to incorporate IRIS image recognition.
This means it will now be able to detect logos, objects or scenes in images and according to the company’s CTO, it’s the first to combine this technology with social marketing tools.