Not to pick on Gawker, but seldom do business people get so much transparent traffic data to see a direct cause-and-effect of a major redesign gone bad (unless they blow a hole in their own foot at some point). So that makes this a uniquely teachable SEO moment. So what happens when you run web properties generating tens of millions of dollars in organic traffic, and one day you push a site redesign to the loud guffaws of many an experienced SEO? Look no further than the graph below.

How much did this mistake cost Gawker? $2 million, $5 million, maybe $10 million of revenue lost to bad SEO. And it’s not like selling mattresses– people don’t come back when the store is open. Missed search traffic can’t come back… you either get the click when the user searches or its lost forever. SEO doesn’t look so expensive anymore.

If you’re responsible for a search-driven web property, for the love of Mike, be smart about SEO. Test, test, test. Hire people who have the battle scars. If Gawker wasn’t owned by a sole proprietor, you can bet there would be some uncomfortable Board meetings with the title of “Why We’ve Missed Our Revenue Forecast for FIVE Months.” The bottom line is, never take your organic search rankings for granted.

• Cloaking
• Duplicate content
• Lost link equity
• Page load speed

But there is one factor I think many overlook: how a successful A/B test can impact your SERP Bounce Back Rate.  SERP Bounce Back Rate is the number of users who visit your site from Google and hit their back button.  This is a critical signal-it basically says to Google, “the user didn’t find what they wanted, now they’re back for something else.”  There is strong evidence Google uses SERP Bounce Back as a ranking signal.  There’s even a commercial blackhat tool out of Russia that attempts to manipulate this signal.   But note, SERP Bounce Back is not the same Bounce Rate most people talk about in A/B Testing.  Traditional Bounce Rate counts anyone who leaves your site after one visit as a “bounce,” even if you gave the user exactly what they wanted.

How Can A/B Test Hurt Your SERP Bounce Back Rate?

The issue isn’t so much that A/B Testing in and of itself can hurt you, it’s that by changing your page at all, you may negatively affect your SERP Bounce Back Rate.  A/B testing can give you false confidence you’re making a safe change.  If you focus solely on your optimization variable and Bounce Rate, you’ll miss it and roll out a change that could tank your traffic.

Why does this happen?

Many people imagine that when users visit their site, there is a limited set of things they can do, like 1) submit a lead, 2) read another page on the site, 3) bounce, or 4) close the browser.    Taking this a step further, they imagine that options 1, 2, and 4 are good and bounces are bad… unless the user bounces because they found something of use.  What they forget is that Google can only see two things: user searched and user came back (or not).  In other words, Google only sees a portion of the bounces, and it’s that portion that you need to manage.  But most sites don’t measure or manage SERP Bounce Back; when they A/B test, they manage only Bounce Rate.

So, you could improve the user experience in every other way-increase time on site, increase pages per visit, increase your average revenue per user, increase satisfaction metrics on your content (if you’re surveying on that), but if the number of visitors who come back to Google increases, you jeopardize your rankings.

Real World Example

Let’s say you run an apartment website and you decide to test a set of “city pages” that rank well for keywords like “[city] + apartments”.  Today, when people come to your page, there are three things they can do: 1) submit a lead for help finding an apartment, 2) click out to an apartments’ website (and leave your site), 3) call the apartment then close the browser, or 4) bounce back to Google.  From your point of view, it would be much better for your business, and (for the sake of argument) for users, to increase the number who submit leads and get free hands-on help from an apartment locator.

So you run an A/B test with a new page layout whose goal is to increase the number of leads by hovering a giant “get free help finding an apartment” button over the page.  Of course you don’t want to spike your bounce rate, so you provide a “no thanks, continue” link below it.  The naïve tester says, “if we generate more leads without increasing our bounce rate, we’ll go ahead.”

The good news arrives after a few weeks of running the test:  leads have doubled and your bounce rate has gone down slightly.

Awesome, right?  Roll out it immediately!  Not so fast.  What if this is how the test looked to Google:

• What you see: 2x more leads with a lower bounce rate.
• What Google sees: 2x higher SERP Bounce Back Rate.

Why? Bounce Rate hides the fact that your giant hover-over button caused 2x more users to have the blink reaction to leave the page… of those left, fewer clicked out to view apartments, so the overall bounce rate went down.

What’s worse is that before you did the test, 90% of your pages were only 10% better than the next-best ranked site sitting below you in the SERP’s, so when you rolled this change across thousands of city pages, it was a enough give them an edge.  You drop from an average #1 position (with 42% of the organic clicks) to #2 (with 11% of the organic clicks).  If your traffic is highly correlated with your revenue, congratulations, you’ve just destroyed 73% of your value as a company.

What Should You Do?

There are three ways to manage the risk of negatively affecting your SERP Bounce Back Rate.

• A/B test on a sandboxed set of pages. It’s common in A/B testing to implement the Javascript code across all pages on your site, and then let the software determine when to send users to version A or B of page being tested. This is a bad idea because it introduces a potential for an unknown change in your SERP Bounce Back Rate to appear sitewide, even if only 30% of your users see the test, whatever impact the test has on SERP Bounce Back will filter into the data visible to Google. Even 30% of traffic behaving differently could be enough to trigger a rankings impact in some SERPs. Instead, select a specific set of URL’s to test, and only implement your testing tool’s Javascript tags on those URL’s. That way, if you start to see a rankings impact on your test group, you’ll where to focus.
• Estimate Your SERP Bounce Back Rate. Measure every possible click on your site and its source, and use the data to back into your SERP Bounce Back Rate. If you capture every possible click referred by Google, then you know the only alternative place for users to go is back to the SERP. But realize your estimate may be imperfect and it would be insufficient to simply sign off on a UI change based solely on that number. You need to test it.
• Test Changes in a Rankings Sandbox. Once you’ve tested a change and feel that it’s safe and effective, release it on a sandboxed sample of pages of your website. It’s important to hardcode the change to a set of URL’s and not to rollout the change with your A/B testing code (i.e. by sending a portion of traffic to your test page) so you can monitor rankings on the top 3 or 4 keywords for each specific page in the sandbox. You need 100% of users hitting these pages so whatever behavior effect with by pronounced and obvious. Watch ranking changes in the test group to rankings changes in a control group for 4 to 6 weeks. After that, you should have a fairly good idea whether your rankings were negatively impacted by the test.

With all things in the arena of SEO, there is no cut and dry, pat answer.   Every question is always in light of competition, always balanced against other signals.  But if you’re A/B testing a change that could impact thousand of pages, there’s a good chance a negative change to your SERP Bounce Back rate will translate into lost rankings and weaker traffic.   And if that happens, you’ll get to explain to everyone why you need to roll back UI changes that appeared to have improved conversion rates, based on a metric you can’t see and don’t have any data about.   So start managing your A/B tests more intelligently by measuring and optimizing your SERP Bounce Back rate.

“Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines ” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise penalized impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action. If a site has been penalized affected by a spam action it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.”

Why would Google change “penalized” to “impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action”?

• They’re trying to make it clear that they have BOTH manual and algorithmic  methods for penalizing sites that violate their guidelines.  Perhaps “penalized” was a big too vague, so they’re going with stronger more direct language to ensure everyone knows a penalty can happen without a manual review.
• Or perhaps by calling out that their algorithms apply penalties, they’re trying to cover how Panda works, which in that case means Panda is really a penalty for violating the Quality Guidelines.
• Given this is the lead paragraph of the Webmaster Guidelines (a highly visible place to make a change), one has to wonder if Google is putting SEO’s on notice to  anticipate another round of major spam penalties coming.

My guess is it’s a bit of cleanup from Panda, and possibly a sign spam enforcement is about to increase.

Let’s assume you know something about SEO.  You understand the basics: there’s a difference between on-page and off-page SEO, you know how to do keyword research, you’ve analyzed your pages with tools like seoMoz and you’re scoring A’s for your target terms (yea for you!), you’ve heard about SEO techniques that may be higher risk than others, and you’ve even built some links by torturing the secrets out of a competitor’s backlink profile.  But you still feel like there’s another level of knowledge and experience you have yet to tap into.  If that’s you, you need Distilled’s Pro SEO Seminar in Boston.

Writing this actually pains me.  I must admit that I had to cancel my reservation due to family obligations (it would have been nice to realize that before I actually booked my flight to Boston and bought my ticket).   But I attended Distilled’s LinkLove Seminar in New Orleans, and it was fantastic.  I bought my ticket for Boston the weekend I got back.  And based on the line-up for Boston, the content is just as strong, if not stronger.

Without further ado, here are my top 5 reasons why you should attend Distilled SEO Pro Seminar in Boston:

5) It’s cheaper.

Distilled SEO Pro Boston is $799 (if you sign up for a free seoMoz Pro trial).  That’s almost half the price of other pro conferences.

4) It’s smaller and more focused.

Small is the new big when it comes to conferences, and for two good reasons: first, cornering a speaker and asking question will be easier, you just have much greater access at a small conference, and second, it’s easier to meet people.  Who wants to attend a conference and spend the whole time talking to their coworkers?!?  Small conferences are less intimidating and people tend to be more open in general.

3) Single track, all organic SEO.

Don’t you hate it when you go to a conference to discover that the PPC kids are getting all the schwag and attention?   Not to mention the awkward conversations you have during the networking part where you’re like, “So what kinds of margins does that PPC traffic drive for you?”  Distilled Pro Boston is a single-track conference, so you’ll be surrounded by people who are passionate, advanced SEO’s.  At least for me, half the attraction of a conference is meeting really smart people who are doing cool things in your field.

2) It’s actually advanced.

Some conferences are billed as advanced and deliver on that promise in about 25% of the sessions.   Knowing how Distilled operates, looking at the agenda, and having seen some of the speakers talk before, this will not be one of them.  This will be a firehose of information.

1) Better content, period.

In New Orleans, I had a chance to talk with Distilled’s Tom Critchlow about their philosophy toward conferences.  He said, in a nutshell, it is to ” never be beaten on content.”  To this end, they hand pick only speakers they have personally seen before.  They also review everyone’s presentations and do a round of quality control to make sure everyone delivers.

Given my experience in New Orleans, I know the quality Distilled can deliver.  The Boston agenda looks fantastic.  The speakers will rock.  The attendees will be cool.   If you can make it to Boston May 16-17 get a ticket before it sells out.  Click here for the details. (Not an affiliate link, by the way, I’m just a huge fan of Distilled).

Which Austin-based Sites Have the Greatest Social Media Impact?
Based on the great reaction to the Austin SEO Power 40 list I published in January, I thought it would be fun to extend the idea to social media. Which Austin-based websites attract the most social media interaction from consumers? The list below attempts to score every Austin-based website based on a weighting of social mentions (Likes, Shares, Tweets, etc.) of each site’s homepage across Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and Delicious.

1. Indeed, FB: 46,720 TW: 530 Buzz: 686 Del: 12,328 (source)
2. VRBO, FB: 29,207 TW: 266 Buzz: 457 Del: 4,520 (source)
3. RetailMeNot, FB: 13,265 TW: 188 Buzz: 1,374 Del: 18,861 (source)
4. AppSumo, FB: 859 TW: 5,510 Buzz: 208 Del: 475 (source)
5. SXSW, FB: 17,588 TW: 72 Buzz: 3,441 Del: 1,533 (source)
6. LiveStrong, FB: 14,316 TW: 891 Buzz: 663 Del: 1,586 (source)
7. MyEDU, FB: 14,912 TW: 783 Buzz: 24 Del: 100 (source)
8. Gowalla, FB: 2,773 TW: Buzz: 10,068 Del: 2,714 (source)
9. HomeAway, FB: 12,697 TW: 198 Buzz: 630 Del: 2,943 (source)
10. Despair Inc., FB: 8,976 TW: 235 Buzz: 902 Del: 3,534 (source)
11. Whole Foods, FB: 7,888 TW: 323 Buzz: 782 Del: 1,014 (source)
12. ACL Festival, FB: 8,965 TW: 300 Buzz: 159 Del: 62 (source)
13. Dell, FB: 3,211 TW: 371 Buzz: 1,884 Del: 1,773 (source)
14. Big Commerce, FB: 422 TW: 1,154 Buzz: 742 Del: 648 (source)
15. Austin American Statesman, FB: 1,715 TW: 218 Buzz: 2,381 Del: 414 (source)
16. Curly Nikki, FB: 3,157 TW: 176 Buzz: 751 Del: 111 (source)
17. Deals2Buy, FB: 2,447 TW: 382 Buzz: 125 Del: 1,256 (source)
18. uvmi, FB: 2,900 TW: 228 Buzz: 353 Del: 164 (source)
19. Patrick’s Just Math Tutorials, FB: 3,816 TW: Buzz: 101 Del: 416 (source)
20. University of Texas, FB: 2,242 TW: 167 Buzz: 360 Del: 434 (source)
21. NaturallyCurly.com, FB: 2,855 TW: 108 Buzz: 59 Del: 434 (source)
22. Salt Lick BBQ, FB: 2,535 TW: 59 Buzz: 290 Del: 126 (source)
23. Stratfor, FB: 874 TW: 236 Buzz: 607 Del: 1,055 (source)
24. UShip, FB: 2,629 TW: 42 Buzz: 19 Del: 587 (source)
25. Texas Tribune, FB: 968 TW: 243 Buzz: 714 Del: 202 (source)
26. a smart bear, FB: 58 TW: 57 Buzz: 1,982 Del: (source)
27. Austin City Limits, FB: 2,639 TW: 75 Buzz: 23 Del: 24 (source)
28. VacationRentals.com, FB: 2,564 TW: 45 Buzz: 12 Del: 210 (source)
29. OtherInbox, FB: 156 TW: 272 Buzz: 918 Del: 599 (source)
30. Spiceworks, FB: 441 TW: 190 Buzz: 158 Del: 2,914 (source)
31. Team Price, FB: 7 TW: 656 Buzz: Del: 3 (source)
32. Qrank, FB: 372 TW: 525 Buzz: 130 Del: 17 (source)
33. WebmasterWorld, FB: 66 TW: 103 Buzz: 544 Del: 3,049 (source)
34. Rick Perry, FB: 1,745 TW: 211 Buzz: 17 Del: 6 (source)
35. CheapStingyBargains.com, FB: 315 TW: 9 Buzz: 1,403 Del: 684 (source)
36. KUT, FB: 2,212 TW: 43 Buzz: 28 Del: 178 (source)
37. KVUE ABC Austin, FB: 1,027 TW: 300 Buzz: 89 Del: 59 (source)
38. The Oasis Restaurant, FB: 2,294 TW: 15 Buzz: 6 Del: 42 (source)
39. Capital Factory, FB: 298 TW: 261 Buzz: 526 Del: 193 (source)
40. Fuddruckers, FB: 1,943 TW: 35 Buzz: 65 Del: 41 (source)

And congrats to the following Austin websites that nearly made the Top 40:
austin360.com, foodonthetable.com, zenoss.com, centralmarket.com, bazaarvoice.com, greenling.com, kgsr.com, mackbrown-texasfootball.com, austinchronicle.com, dachisgroup.com, academicsuperstore.com, apartmentratings.com, texasmonthly.com, buildasign.com, frontgatetickets.com, volusion.com, texassports.com, gamesalad.com, pubcon.com, snappages.com, kxan.com, spoontheband.com, tabbedout.com, bedandbreakfast.com, zebraimaging.com, myfoxaustin.com, infochimps.org, brokenspokeaustintx.com, austintexas.org, volunteerspot.com, 590klbj.com, orgsync.com, driskillhotel.com, klbjfm.com, hoovers.com, sanjosehotel.com, flotrack.org, pluck.com, mindbites.com, spredfast.com, socialsmack.com, darksiders.com, waterloorecords.com, recyclematch.com, workstreamer.com, budurl.com, agentgenius.com, lakeaustin.com, kw.com, flowrestling.org, sweetleaftea.com, greenmountainenergy.com, bookpeople.com, gsdm.com, dadlabs.com, fundable.com, originalalamo.com, telligent.com, creditcards.com, amysicecreams.com, stubbsaustin.com, emosaustin.com, lifesize.com, wholinkstome.com, fictionaut.com, austincc.edu, 6street.com, netspend.com, interspire.com, cyberhomes.com, vast.com, cyberrentals.com, ni.com, convio.com, infochimps.com, firewheeldesign.com, weareaustin.com, oneworldtheatre.org, techrepublic.com, schlotzskys.com, campus2careers.com, offers.com, rdiconnect.com, splashmedia.com, calendars.com, governor.state.tx.us, freescale.com, recklesskelly.com, duels.com, deals.com, valueweb.com, guyforsyth.com, challengegames.com, blellow.com, buzzstream.com, spooonful.com, cheaptweet.com, speakermatch.com, keepstream.com, incspring.com, gallerydirect.com, snocap.com, thirteen23.com, snapstream.com, golfsmith.com, cyc.com, ci.austin.tx.us, carinos.com, affiliatetip.com, titosvodka.com, mytoons.com, hotschedules.com, bandize.com, onesource.com, and hurricaneparty.com.

It’s worth pointing out, the numbers used for the calculation of each website’s social media impact are based on shares of each site’s homepage, so it’s possible that a site that attracts a lot of mentions to its internal pages is under-counted.

This list highlights which websites in Austin are most successful at driving valuable organic traffic from Google. The number next to each is the estimated max monthly value of each site’s organic traffic, (Search Traffic Value from SEMRush):

1. Dell, $17,104,654
2. Indeed, $13,700,900
3. RetailMeNot, $12,140,303
4. University of Texas, $3,566,742
5. BedandBreakfast.com, $2,922,996
6. CreditCards.com, $1,928,227
7. ApartmentRatings.com, $1,691,223
8. Golfsmith, $1,669,038
9. Vast, $1,455,373
10. VacationRentals.com, $1,421,483
11. VRBO, $1,034,535
12. HomeAway, $884,072
13. ExpertVillage, $808,083
14. WebmasterWorld, $769,794
15. New Home Source, $563,245
16. Ticket City, $554,225
17. Academic Superstore, $551,353
18. Spiceworks, $543,295
19. CheapStingyBargains.com, $537,803
20. Calendars.com, $489,395
21. Solarwinds, $438,009
22. National Instruments, $405,766
23. UShip, $371,866
24. Austin American Statesman, $315,876
25. NaturallyCurly.com, $304,882
26. Offers.com, $303,974
27. Apartment Home Living, $260,799
28. Aspyr Media, $257,203
29. Deals2Buy, $215,481
30. Fox 7 Austin, $204,597
31. Freescale, $184,797
32. Gowalla, $181,514
33. BuildASign, $150,811
34. NetSpend, $140,665
35. SelfStorage.com, $139,831
36. B Side Entertainment, $125,566
37. GreatRentals.com, $122,003
38. Austin Chronicle, $120,594
39. ThatRentalSite.com, $113,352
40. KVUE ABC Austin, $103,988

What motivated this list? I saw an an interesting post on Quora recently asking about the most successful consumer web startups to come out of Austin.  Despite living her for 10 years, I’m still surprised by the quiet little success stories I uncover, so I thought it would be interesting to see if I could find any new ones that might be overlooked by the startup press and the Statesman. So I pulled the list of Austin startups from Crunchbase, AreaStartups, and my memory and then got data from SEMRush on the estimated “Search Engines Traffic Value,” which is a function of a) rankings, and b) the value of a site’s keywords.  From the perspective of an SEO, this list represents which websites in Austin are most successful at attracting organic traffic from Google.

One interesting factoid– Austin is home to 5 out of the Top 10, and 14 of the Top 20 SEO power websites in Texas (travelocity.com, match.com, ti.com, dealtaker.com among them).

If I’ve forgotten your company, please get in touch to let me know!

Google site:usehipster.com and view some of the cached pages (before they disappear since they’ve since password-protected everything).

Here’s a screenshot…

• Googlebot Persona [pdf]
• Google Webmaster Guidelines
  This is the “rule book” for Google.
• Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide [pdf]
  If only regular human users could write a book about their needs that is as clear and useful as this!

Any questions? Get in touch!