by Laurie Sullivan, Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 24, 2017
Searchmetrics released its third-annual Winners and Losers report this week. This year’s report reveals that publishers with specific editorial direction and household-name Web sites like Wikipedia and Facebook had the greatest gains, while other informational sites showed declines in desktop search.
This analysis — conducted over the course of a year — is based on the SEO Visibility of individual Web sites, a metric that Searchmetrics developed as an indicator for measuring a Web page’s performance in organic search. The company looked for those domains that displayed the largest change in SEO Visibility.
The lists of winners and losers is sorted by “absolute change” and the percentage of change. Searchmetrics removed adult and unofficial streaming Web sites, along with migrated domains, from both lists.
Topics that attracted the most visits to publisher sites range from terrorism and immigration to elections. A “strong economic” recovery gave strength to shopping sites.
Wikipedia.org took a beating for the greatest loss in total visibility, but the lowest visibility in percentage of loss. Hollywoodlife.com took the highest percentage loss in visibility. (See the list here.)
Google.com took the top spot with in visibility, but when it came to the site reaping rewards for the most improved as well as visibility gains, Pinterest took the honor.
Pinterest, with its 150 million global users, recently announced the use of deep-learning technology, a precursor to artificial intelligence, to generate more relevant results that evolve based on user behavior. This can help a company understand the “ultimate” intent of a user to generate more loyalty.
Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook also had top visibility gains, but the percentage gains from 2015 lagged at 22%, 6%, 28%, and 5%, respectively.
Google took the No. 1 spot in the category of search and portals in terms of total visibility gain, followed by medlineplus.gov at No. 2, Hotmail at No. 3, and AOL at No. 4 out of 100 sites.
In the category of shopping in terms of total visibility gain, Apple ranked No. 1, eBay ranked No. 2, Retailmenot, ranked No. 3, Target ranked No. 4, Walmart ranked No. 5, theblackfriday ranked No. 6, babycenter ranked No. 7, nerdwallet ranked No. 8, blackfriday ranked No. 9, and npmjs ranked No. 10 out of 100 sites.
The winning categories on google.com began with media and events at 38%, followed by shopping at 19%, social media at 10%, encyclopedia at 6%, search and portals at 4%, travel at 2%, and other at 21%.
MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily
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