The State of Links: Yesterday’s Ranking Factor?

Back in Google’s early days, people navigated the web using links, and this made PageRank an excellent proxy for popularity and authority. The web is moving away from primarily link-based surfing, and Google no longer needs a proxy — so what, in 2017, is the point in links?

(Spoilers: We’re not done with them yet…)

Getting Started with Measuring Brand Awareness

This article originally appeared over at https://www.distilled.net/measuring-brand-awareness/. That URL 404s at the time of writing, hence the new location here.

Few people dispute that brand awareness is an important consideration for companies of all sizes – there’s a half-trillion dollar global advertising industry built largely on that premise, after all. In the SEO industry, however, we’re probably not as aware of it as we should be. I recently published a study on Moz showing that branded search volume is better correlated with organic search ranking in Google than Domain Authority, and as Google gets smarter and links become increasingly unrepresentative of how the web works, we can only expect this relationship to deepen.

Continue reading “Getting Started with Measuring Brand Awareness”