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Accidental SEO Tests: How 301 Redirects Are Likely Impacting Your Brand

Posted by Wayfair

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

At Wayfair.com, we conduct a lot of SEO tests. We're constantly measuring and evaluating our strategies, some of which were shared in our last post for YouMoz, Accidental SEO Tests: When On-Page Optimization Ceases to Matter. Sometimes, however, we stumble across what we call "accidental SEO tests." This typically happens when a bad code deploy unintentionally hurts our SEO, and we end up learning something useful from our mistake.

Tens of thousands of 301 redirects

One of our accidental tests involved regularly 301-redirecting large batches (i.e., tens of thousands) of product pages. On average, we found a consistent (and essentially permanent) traffic loss of about 15% for 301-redirected URLs.

In the past, Google has said a small amount of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect, which is the same as through a link. Now, for the first time, we can put a hard number to how much that loss is.

Structure of an accidental SEO test

Like any good SEO team, our product pages were set to use the name of the product in the URL. Furthermore, if for any reason a product URL was changed, the old URL was set to automatically redirect to the new one.

What we didn’t realize, though, is that our merchandising teams were also busy being good at their jobs, part of which involved changing the naming standards of products on a regular basis. Every change they made was good for the customer. But when the the naming standards changed, it caused thousands of products to change names. This, in turn, updated the URLs of those product pages, triggering a 301 redirect on every page.

For example, when updating for the purpose of having a consistent style, the merchandising team changed “barstools” to the more accurate two-word version of the product name, “bar stools.” Wayfair had over 8,000 bar stools, all of which 301-redirected to a new URL following the name change. Then, a couple of months later, the merchandising team found that they were getting better results by including the height of the bar stool in the product name, so they updated the product names again, which resulted in the product pages 301-updating once more to a brand new set of URLs.

This process of updating product names was being implemented across dozens of different product classes, with multiple updates per month. It quickly added up to a lot of 301 redirects.

Measuring the impact

After reshaping our URL logic to prevent the constant redirects, we realized that we had a great opportunity to find out exactly how 301 redirects affect organic traffic. Nailing down data was easy. We had the exact dates of the changes; groups of thousands to tens of thousands of pages, with tens of thousands of organic visits; and could compare those classes against others that we knew didn’t change to exclude the impact of Wayfair’s overall increase in organic traffic.

We found with surprising consistency that we had a drop very close to 15% of organic traffic for any product class that changed URLs. In our bar stools example, we lost just under 15% of organic traffic at the first change. When the URL changed again over a month later, we lost another 15%.

Every product class we looked at showed the same drop within one to two weeks of the change. Sometimes the drop was almost immediate (like with bar stools); other times, however, it was spread out over a couple weeks (e.g., area rugs, with over 30,000 products).

We did not see any evidence of recovery from the impact of the 301 redirects, even after many months. There was the appearance of recovery — class traffic levels eventually returned to where they started — but that was because our overall organic traffic was increasing across the entire site. We were still 15% below where we would have been without the redirects.

What’s particularly fascinating about this number, 15%, is that it is exactly the amount of PageRank loss Google described in the original PageRank paper. So our measured results matched theory with surprising precision. Perhaps the broader authority signals Google now measures follow the same logic for flowing through pages as they did in 1998? Or perhaps it’s just a happy coincidence.

What it means

We’ve always known there was a “small” cost to implementing a 301 redirect, but our accidental SEO test showed us that the cost is quite significant, and it becomes much greater with every hop in a redirect chain.

It’s worth stressing, however, that we are not saying that 301-redirecting any particular page is going to cost you 15% of your organic traffic. If you rank in position #1 for competitive terms, a redirect could drop you to position #2 or #4. That would cost you far more than 15% of your organic traffic. On the other hand, your page could be so strong that you may not not see any loss in rankings after redirecting it.

What our data suggests is that, on average, there’s a 15% traffic loss following a 301 redirect; but any individual redirect could be much better, or much worse.

While 301-redirecting a dead or changed page to the new location is still good practice, the best practice of all is not to change your URL in the first place.

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Leverage This Social Network Mind Trick for More Effective Influencer Marketing

Posted by KelseyLibert

Did it feel like everyone you knew was watching “Making a Murderer” at the same time? It may have just been an illusion, thanks to a few key members of your social network.

Researchers at the University of Southern California recently uncovered that when something appears more popular than it actually is, it can create the right conditions for it to be widely spread. They named this social network phenomenon the majority illusion, which happens due to highly-connected individuals within a social network skewing the group’s perception. These findings explain something we already knew — well-connected individuals can wield extraordinary influence. The majority illusion may also explain why it can take only a handful of the right influencers to make something go viral.

Marketers can leverage the majority illusion to create the tipping point needed to drive action or spread a message far and wide. It starts with identifying influencers who have the potential to create the majority illusion among your target demographic, and then encouraging those influencers to help amplify your message.

How social influencers can create the illusion of popularity

Are you surprised when your non-marketer friends are completely unaware of something that was major news in the marketing world? You may think it’s popular because you kept seeing it discussed by key members of your network, which can give the impression that it’s universally popular.

Image source

Let’s say that in the figure above, each of the colored nodes is a Nickelback fan. The networks are identical, except different people are Nickelback fans in each figure. Since the Nickelback fans in figure A have more connections, it may appear to their network that Nickelback’s music is popular. This is how the majority illusion can create the impression within a group that an idea, behavior, or attribute is common, even if the opposite is true.

How a social network is structured

By illustrating how a social network is organized, we can see how an idea can potentially spread across communities or stay within a select group.

We modeled a network graph of 77 Twitter influencers across eight different verticals: automotive, business, entertainment, finance, health, lifestyle, technology, and travel. Influencers were chosen based on criteria including relevance to a vertical and engagement. In order to create a usable graph, we then narrowed down the influencers’ 19 million followers to about 8,600 second-degree influencers. We chose those users based on a set of criteria that signaled mid-level influence: a following greater than 30,000, a follower to following ratio of at least 1:1, and a “lists per followers” rate of at least 6.5 (the number of times they have been added to a Twitter list per thousand of followers). Side note: Wondering why you can’t find Rand? He’s too popular to meet the parameters we set for a “mid-level” influencer.

The resulting network illustrates the hierarchical relationships of first- and second-level influencers within a social network. Click here to see the full interactive graph.

The nodes represent individuals, while the relationships between individuals are expressed as lines. The larger a node, the more relationships the individual has within the network. It’s important to understand this does not mean the large nodes have the most followers within the network; rather, they have the most connections within a particular network (some being first-degree, second-degree, third-degree connections, etc.).

By examining this graph, you can see that social influence is more like six degrees of Kevin Bacon than a popularity contest. Because of this, marketers should focus on getting their message spread by influencers within a focused niche or strategically-positioned influencers to maximize reach, rather than looking for influencers who merely have a large following.

Finding strategically-positioned influencers

Tools such as BuzzSumo and Followerwonk are a good jumping off point for finding influencers within a vertical. But you want to look at more than the number of followers, because influence depends on far more than popularity.

There are three main factors for determining the most powerful members of a network:

• Betweenness Centrality: An individual’s location between different sections of a network
• Degrees: The number of connections, or edges, an individual has
• Closeness: The average number of degrees between the individual and others in the network

So which of these variables are most important? It depends on your goals.

Do you want people to take an action? Niche influencers may be best to create the majority illusion and give the impression of popularity, thus spurring others to mimic their behavior. An influencer’s closeness may be the most important factor in this case, since it signals they share a lot of connections with other individuals in their network. When you consider all of the common relationships within a niche group, it’s easy to see how these groups are susceptible to the majority illusion effect.

Are the goals for your content expanding brand awareness or increasing viral potential? Influencers with connections to other communities may be most effective for reaching a large audience. Betweenness centrality is the greatest signal of strategic positioning, since it shows the individual’s potential to influence and connect different groups.

Influencing a niche group

If you want to create the majority illusion within a niche-focused group, target influencers with followers similar to them who have a low number of followers.

Notice how some groups are isolated on the edges of the graph. We can assume the “majority illusion” is likely to happen within these groups since they have little to no overlap with the other communities.

The researchers found that the majority illusion occurs most frequently in networks where individuals with a low degree of connections tend to connect with individuals with a high degree of connections. Those with a low number of connections may be easier to influence since they aren’t exposed to a wide range of ideas and opinions — plus they have less noise in their stream, so they are likely to see what the influencer posts.

Getting a handful of niche influencers talking about your brand within the same time period may be the key to creating an impression of popularity. I see this happen all the time on niche blogs, where several blogs do a sponsored post or review of the same product within a short time period. It does have the effect of making it feel like you’ve seen something everywhere, even though only a few people are talking about it.

Influencing a wide audience

If you want your content amplified to the widest possible audience, target influencers who are followed by other influencers and have diverse connections across different communities.

The closer an influencer is to the center of the graph, the more visibility they have across multiple verticals. This gives your content a better chance of escaping the echo chamber likely to occur within the more isolated groups. Individuals strategically positioned within their network, rather than those who are the most popular, may be the most effective at influencing a large number of people.

Two great examples of this within our network model are Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs) and Daniel Pink (@DanielPink). Notice how their connections are spread across different groups.

Example: @MarketingProfs

Example: @DanielPink

You don’t need to build your own social network graph to identify influencers with high betweenness centrality. Look for a mix of these two factors to spot strategically-positioned influencers:

1. Influencers who are followed by other influencers. Consider the ripple effect that can happen when an influencer shares something and then other influencers following them share it.
2. Influencers who are followed by people across multiple verticals. Potential reach is greater among influencers who have a diverse following, since their followers can spread things throughout multiple networks.

Need help finding the right influencers? Check out our guide to identifying effective influencers. Once you pinpoint the influencers who can help you achieve your desired goal, be sure to deploy Rand’s advice on getting influencers to amplify your message.

By visualizing the structure of a social network, you can see that having a lot of followers doesn’t necessarily equate to influence. Influencers within closely-knit groups may be best suited for influencing their followers to take action or adopt an opinion, since this type of group is primed for creating the majority illusion that "everyone’s doing it." To reach a large audience, marketers should enlist the help of influencers who are strategically positioned between social communities, rather than those with a Kardashian-sized following.

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