ryanb

We use Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and third party services to supplement keyword rankings data -- we don't crawl Google SERPs. :) Plenty of other companies do, though. Moz has great keyword ranking data.

Good question -- all of the things you mention are factors. It's harder to run statistically significant experiments with really small sites that have few pages. The factors involved are: # of total pages, search traffic, and Google crawl rate.

That's part of our secret sauce. :)

I think this is a super compelling idea. : ) Thanks!

Yep, we work with all languages. One caveat though is we only test against Google metrics, so if you live in a country where Google is not the predominant search engine, we're of no help at the moment. : )

Thanks! Great questions

1) We actually work with CloudFlare/CloudFront etc if companies are already using them. In that case, we sit in between CloudFlare and your origin webserver. But if you don't already have a CDN in front of your website, our SEO CDN goes in front of your origin webserver, and we use AWS so as far as Google is concerned it looks like AWS. We also use different IPs for every customer.

2) We don't do cloaking - we're essentially testing somewhat small tweaks across groups of similar pages, and seeing if they have any impact on clicks or rankings. It is preferred if the pages remain largely the same, but they don't have to be totally untouched.

We look at Clicks, Rankings and Impressions. We use Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and another third party data source.

More clicks is obviously the ultimate goal, but sometimes we also have significant experiments where rankings or impressions going up are the key metric

It's based on how much traffic goes through our CDN. If you signup on our site or send me a note directly ryan@rankscience.com I can give you more details

Thanks Tom. Would love to buy you guys a beer sometime. : )

Oh, I misunderstood. Good question. A lot of people have suggested this. The main reason we've avoided it is complexity, but it's something we might revisit. I'd also be concerned about customers not having an easy way to understand our pricing.

Ours is automated and continuous, and there's is a self-service product. We like those guys though!

The biggest reason is that there's so much more volume in organic search (80% of all clicks) vs paid search (20%), and the ROI on SEO is so high. There's also so many companies in the PPC space -- it's quite saturated. SEO is appealing to us because we think it's overlooked due to stigma.

SEO and PPC are really two very different games overall, but I have a ton of respect for people who are really good at PPC.

We're not reverse engineering Google's ranking algorithm, so no. : ) Good luck to anyone trying to do that! (I'd recommend against it) Yes, you're allowed to make changes to your pages.

This is link is related to Conversation Rate Optimization testing (like Optimizely). We don't do A/B testing on single pages, or do cloaking or anything of the sort, but we run experiments across groups of URLs, and then we sum up the results and run our analysis.

Also, our goal is not to deceive Google in anyway - a lot of our tests are related to increasing CTR (which is testing humans) and on-page times. (again testing humans) Overall we're trying to make pages better according to Google guidelines -- which leads to a better experience for users.

Some more explanation of how it works here: https://www.rankscience.com/how-it-works

The only way to deal with Google algorithm updates is through experimentation. A data-driven approach is the only approach. : ) Staying abreast of what both Google is saying publicly and what the SEO community is saying also helps (ie Google announced they're cracking down on intrusive pop-ups for mobile sites)

Site performance is always relative to your competitors. Optimal server response time is around 200ms, and that's what folks should strive for, but I've seen sites have really slow pages and still get lots of traffic.

RankScience automates split-testing for SEO to grow organic search traffic for businesses. 80% of clicks from Google go to organic results and yet most companies don't know how to improve their SEO, or can't effectively measure their efforts to do so. Because of the scale of SEO and the constant change of both Google's ranking algorithm and your competitors' SEO campaigns, the only way to succeed in the long-run is with software and continuous testing.

We've built a CDN that enables our software to provide tactical SEO execution and run A/B testing experiments for SEO across millions of pages. Experiments typically take 14-21 days for Google to index and react to changes, and we use Bayesian Structural Time Series and Negative Binomial Regression models to determine the statistical significance of our experiments.

Our software is 100% technical SEO, and doesn't do anything black-hat, spammy, or anything related to link-building. One of our goals is to bring transparency and shed light on what is largely considered a shady industry, but is so important to so many companies' revenue and growth. In fact, If SEO didn't have such a bad reputation, we think someone else would have built this a long time ago.

SEO as an industry earned itself a stigma for being spammy: between buying links, creating low-quality pages stuffed with keywords and text intended for Google rather than humans, and the used car salesmen attitude that many SEOs have, many people have been conditioned to dismiss SEO as an invalid or illegitimate growth channel.

We're software engineers-turned-SEO's, who have previously consulted for dozens of companies on SEO, from YC startups to Fortune 500 companies like Pfizer. We previously shared our case study with HN, where we increased search traffic to Coderwall with one A/B test: https://www.rankscience.com/coderwall-seo-split-test

Ask us anything! We'd love to answer any questions you have about SEO, A/B testing, and RankScience.

RankScience | https://www.rankscience.com | SF Bay Area or Remote

Hiring: Front-end Developers, DevOps Engineers, SEO Analysts

RankScience automates split-testing for SEO to grow organic search traffic for businesses. 80% of clicks from Google go to organic results and yet most companies don't know how to improve their SEO, or can't effectively measure their efforts to do so. Because both Google and your competitors are always changing, the only way to succeed in the long-run is with software.

We've built a CDN that enables our software to modify HTML and run A/B testing experiments for SEO across groups of pages. Experiments typically take 14-21 days for Google to index and react to changes, and we use Bayesian Time Series models to determine the statistical significance of our experiments.

E-mail founders@rankscience.com with any interest.

What content were you hoping for?

Great post and kudos for the strength to write this. Last year, 7 Cups launched a Startup Support system for founders, that you might find of use: http://www.7cups.com/startups/

Good question -- we think it's because people searching for programming related help are lost and want clear, simple answers to their problems.

Which one of these results would you click on? (query: mysql split string)

http://i.imgur.com/CWxs0dK.png

Inferring causal impact using Bayesian structural time-series models: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub41854.html

There wasn't a sudden increase in rankings - this test showed CTR from Google increased dramatically with the change. When it was rolled out to the entire site, clicks went up, and over many weeks impressions/rankings followed.

RankScience | Part-time SEO Analysts

Remote Only

We're hiring part-time SEO analysts to conduct site audits and help come up with on-going technical SEO experiments to help clients' pages rank higher. http://www.rankscience.com

Knowledge of SEO, HTML, JavaScript necessary.

E-mail me directly at founders+jobs@ranksci.com and let me know why you're interested and qualified.

RankScience | Part-time SEO Analysts

Remote Only

We're hiring part-time SEO analysts to conduct site audits and help come up with on-going technical SEO experiments to help clients' pages rank higher. http://www.ranksci.com

Knowledge of SEO, HTML, JavaScript necessary.

E-mail me directly at ryan+jobs@ranksci.com

Garry's advice and support throughout YC (and afterwards) was unparalleled, but more importantly, he's just a really good person. I'll never forget when he broke out Photoshop during office hours and redesigned our app on the spot!

Congrats and enjoy some much deserved time away!

I think this is the most ambitious YC batch in recent memory. The ideas you've mentioned above are potentially huge. (sandwich making robots, anyone can start their own coffeeshop business)

There's been a number of attempts at this - see ShareDesk.

It's hard to get excited about software for lawyers, and I think that's why Disco has flown under the radar a bit, but I think these guys are going to be huge. They've made exponential improvements in e-discovery software.

I can vouch that these guys create great courses - I completed their iOS7 programming one and it was fantastic. Eliot is super accessible too, if you have questions.

Jack and Russ are relentless founders and I'm continually impressed by them. The ticket buying experience through SeatGeek is so easy and is particularly delightful on mobile. Excited to see what they're able to do with this funding.