Research reveals new insights into how featured snippets work This new study documents a never before made connection between featured snippets and regular snippets in the search results, as well as a new way to recognize when your site is competing for a featured snippet. I'm also going ... Read More >
Rating the Smarts of the Digital Personal Assistants
As Seen InOn March 8, 2017, I published the results of our study to see which was smarter, the Google Assistant on Google Home or Alexa on the Amazon Echo. As it happens, we tested Bing’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri all at the same time. We also tested Google ... Read More >
Mobile vs Desktop Usage: Mobile Grows But Desktop Still a Big Player
You may have heard a rumor that the mobile revolution is upon us, ;->, and it surely is, but just how far along have we come? In today's post, I'm going to share hardcore stats pulled from SimilarWeb that will help you get the complete picture. The assembled data shown here is based on ... Read More >
Does Google Use Chrome to Discover New URLs for Crawling?
Many people assume that Google leverages all of its vast information resources in every way possible. For example, the great majority of people who think about it probably assume that Google uses their Chrome browser as a data source, and in particular, that they use it to discover new ... Read More >
Google Home vs. Amazon Alexa Showdown: Which One is Smarter?
The arrival of the Amazon Echo in the U.S. on June 23, 2015 was notable because it was the first mass-market consumer-level device responding to voice control with general purpose functions, such as playing music. More recently on November 4, 2016, Google released a competing device known ... Read More >
31 Must Know Stats About The Continuing Growth of Voice Commands With Smartphones
Do you talk to your mobile device in public? Would you do it on the street, but not in a rest room? Why? We wanted to know, so we surveyed 914 users to learn how they interact with devices today, with many questions focusing on how they use voice commands with their smartphones. Without ... Read More >
Google Indexing of Twitter Appears to Be Declining
At Stone Temple, we've been actively tracking Google's indexation of Twitter since July of 2014. Today, I'm publishing our fourth update, and it offers up some fascinating insights. At the end of this post you'll find a handy slide deck summary of the whole study. To start, here are two ... Read More >
Shopping and Finance Apps: What Do People Care Most About?
We live in an increasingly mobile world. The June 2015 comScore US Mobile App report showed that 44% of all digital media time spent was being spent in smartphone apps. Note: that was a percentage of all digital media time, inclusive of time spent on desktop and tablets. If that number ... Read More >
Are Links Still a Powerful Ranking Factor? (New Study)
As seen in...Are Links Still Important for SEO? You've seen the claims:"So Many New Ranking Factors!" "Content Quality is Everything!" "User Engagement is the New King!!" "Social Media Signals Rock!" "RankBrain has Taken Over All ... Read More >
What Was the Impact of Google’s Second Mobile Update?
On May 11, 2016, Google "finished" rolling out its second mobile rankings update. Today we're publishing the results of our study to measure the impact of this new algo update. Google's first mobile update was a big one, was this one as significant?To find out, we took a baseline ... Read More >
Google’s Featured Snippets: Automated Continuous Improvement
Today I'm publishing the third of our detailed studies on Google's rich answers in search. Google continues to make major investments in showing rich answers (sometimes called direct answers by others) above the regular search results. At Stone Temple Consulting, we've been tracking the ... Read More >
Does Google Monitor Smartphone Clipboards to Discover New URLs?
This may seem like a very specific question, but understanding how Google discovers new content is just the type of stuff that the geeks of the IMEC board love to do!TL:DR: For those of you who don't want to read the whole story, the short answer is NO, there was no evidence that Google ... Read More >
