Rank Ranger Blog

Have you noticed that when you search a #hashtag on Google, you get to see options to search the hashtag on Twitter and on Facebook, as well as having a stream of Google+ mentions on the right hand side?

An upgrade to Rank Ranger's SEO Platform began with a flurry effect in November that has escalated into a blizzard of new reports, features and apps during February!  If you're as busy as I've been you may have missed a few of the announcements, and since I personally prefer to read snippets of info and click thru only to things that pique my interest, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of recent headlines with snippets and screenshots that cover some important changes and enhancements to our SEO platform.

Last week Google decided to take a hard line on sites that are using scraped content and provided a form for the general public to be able to report such websites that they have found are scraping their content and, if applicable, are outranking them on SERPs. This was sent out in a tweet by the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts, which caused quite a stir when Dan Barker replied showing Google scraping content from Wikipedia and outranking them.

Facebook announced that as of February 24th 2014, they are introducing a new feature that will show Page posts tagging other brands to some fans of the brand tagged. This is a huge opportunity for brands to reach out to new audiences who are interested in their offerings. 

With the implementation of Google ‘secure search’ (Not Provided) in 2011 blocking 10% of the keyword data and impacting a whopping ~80% through the end of 2013 - thrusting yet another new challenge in the face of SEO - user clicks on SERP links are redirected through a Google masked keyword data process.

Rank Ranger heard an enormous outcry from SEO experts and we responded with a new approach, an alternative to (Not Provided). We're pleased to introduce the Market Reach report.

Yahoo Mail bringing in 3 major upgrades with auto-suggestions for email recipients, storing all email addresses seen in your mailbox and seeing a photo and full name of your contacts when adding them as recipients.

The Domain Analysis report provides a comprehensive overview of domain statistics in living color. Choose from a variety of report options and launch - the domain home page displays in living color and a Google Supplementary Index Ratio pie chart comes to life beside the latest Social Metrics from Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook. Integrated data from third-party providers completes this presentation that we think you’ll be proud to share with your clients.

With real time traffic, directions with multiple stops, 3D satellite images and more, the new Google Maps looks great! It's time to get where you're going, faster and with much more detail, so get ready and go somewhere.

It has become increasingly difficult to stay on top of Google Rankings, especially with a number of landing pages to track. With Rank Ranger’s new Landing Page Performance report, you can see in one glance how well all of your landing pages are performing, while at the same time confirming which keywords are responsible for the performance. This simple way to track the success of your SEO efforts will show you which pages are performing well and which need work.

As a business owner, you probably get generic emails all the time stating there are many things wrong with your site. These emails come with a promise to fix up your site so it ranks number one for just a few hundred dollars.

You know you need to spiff up your site, and you are leery of these unsolicited emails. But on the other side of the coin you have SEO agencies that may charge $1000 or more for a site audit. So what do you do? What should be included in a site audit and how do you know if you got your money’s worth?

A multi-axis graph coupled with a detailed search query table makes Rank Ranger's new Search Queries Keywords and Search Queries Pages reports unique.  In Google Webmaster Tools this data is displayed on a one axis graph that merges both Clicks and Impressions, while Rank Ranger's new Search Query reports provide a separate axis for each making it possible to visualize the ratio between Clicks and Impressions and identify wide gaps.

Google's Top Heavy Update #3 targets websites that spam or overuse ads on their pages.

Our Rank Risk Index was displaying Code Orange activity and we noticed webmaster & SEO forums had some chatter about significant traffic drops. So we ventured over to Matt Cutts' blog and Twitter feed in search of some answers and finally the announcement was made.