Google will block access to its autocomplete API to unauthorised users starting from 10 August 2015.

When asked about the move, Google explained: "We built autocomplete as a complement to Search, and never intended that it would exist disconnected from the purpose of anticipating user search queries.

"Over time we’ve realized that, while we can conceive uses for an autocomplete data feed outside search results that may be valuable, overall the content of our automatic completions are optimized and intended to be used in conjunction with web search results and, outside the context of a web search, don’t provide a meaningful user benefit."

There have been several games and other sites created using the API with the idea of guessing exactly what Google would come up with for certain combinations of words.

The complete picture for the service is that it was originally designed for use only within the context of the Google Search itself. The API has remained unofficially available, but hasn't really been part of the official Google offering.

Google goes on to say: "In the interest of maintaining the integrity of autocomplete as part of Search, we will be restricting unauthorized access to the unpublished autocomplete API as of 10 August 2015.

"We want to ensure that users experience autocomplete as it was designed to be used - as a service closely tied to Search. We believe this provides the best user experience for both services."

Anyone who wants to make use of the autocomplete feature in the way they see fit can still do so using the Google Custom Search feature for their own site.

The API came about as a result of reverse engineering by the community and this hasn't always been a bad thing. The Google Maps API also began unofficially before eventually being adopted (and licensed for a charge) by Google.

Earlier this year, Google killed off the YouTube v2 API pulling down support for a number of smart devices which relied on it.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

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Are you ready for the Google Mobile-friendly algorithm change which could be 'bigger than Panda or Penguin'?

Back in November 2014,  Google gave its first guidance about the impending algorithm changes to affect mobile SEO which were summarised in this Smart Insights alert. More recently, Google has been unusually specific and has revealed on its blog that there will be an algorithm update on the 21st April 2015, that will expand their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.

How much difference will the mobile-friendly update make?

The indications are that this will be a major change with Google describing it as 'significant' in their alerts. Then, in this alarming quote, Google's Zineb Ait Bahajji  said at SMX Munich that the upcoming mobile-friendly algorithm update will impact more sites than their Panda or Penguin algorithms. Although this sounds alarming it is to be expected since Panda and Penguin targeted a limited set of sites using spammy tactics, while this will affect all searches on mobile - that's why Google says it's significant.

Since we're now getting close and the impact is significant, this post is another reminder to explain the changes and impact according to Google so you can check the likely impact to your site or your clients and be in a position to explain it? Let's start with the big picture.

Will the update affect all pages on a site?

Google has announced that this update will take place in ‘real-time’, meaning that if changes are made to make websites more mobile-friendly, as soon as the changes have been indexed by Google the benefits will be realised.

Google has also said that this algorithm update will impact sites on a page-by-page basis, meaning that only those pages that are not mobile-friendly will be impacted, rather than the wider domain.

This will mean that websites not deemed to be ‘mobile-friendly’ will suffer from reduced visibility within organic search results. It’s also possible that this reduction in visibility may extend to desktop as an additional incentive to webmasters to improve mobile experiences. We'll explain how you can test your pages are mobile friendly below.

Why is Google implementing these changes?

At present, Google considers that the experience of some sites featured in the mobile search results are simply not good enough for the increasing majority of people now using Google on their mobile devices.

Despite the promotion of YouTube, Android and Google+, Google is still heavily reliant on AdWords to generate the majority of their revenue. If a search does not offer value to users, then they may end up going elsewhere, representing a risk to Google’s revenue stream.

At the moment, mobile search results largely match desktop and are typically ranked based on the merits of the desktop site based on the combination of on-page and off-page ranking factors. However, it seems Google believe this isn't acceptable with the tipping point of mobile traffic outstripping desktop traffic by Q2 2015 already passed.

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As we noted earlier this year, today’s the day we begin globally rolling out our mobile-friendly update. We’re boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Now searchers can more easily find high-quality and relevant results where text is readable without tapping or zooming, tap targets are spaced appropriately, and the page avoids unplayable content or horizontal scrolling.

This update:

• Affects only search rankings on mobile devices
• Affects search results in all languages globally 
• Applies to individual pages, not entire websites

While the mobile-friendly change is important, we still use a variety of signals to rank search results. The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal -- so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query. 

To check if your site is mobile-friendly, you can examine individual pages with the Mobile-Friendly Test or check the status of your entire site through the Mobile Usability report in Webmaster Tools. If your site’s pages aren’t mobile-friendly, there may be a significant decrease in mobile traffic from Google Search. But have no fear, once your site becomes mobile-friendly, we will automatically re-process (i.e., crawl and index) your pages.  You can also expedite the process by using Fetch as Google with Submit to Index, and then your pages can be treated as mobile-friendly in ranking.

Questions? See our FAQ or ask on the Mobile Websites section of the Webmaster Forum. 

Google seems to have made an update to their local search ranking factors, where many local SEO experts and reporters are noticing major shifts in the local results.

Days after Google apologized for the Google Maps Googlebomb racist results, it seems the local search results have drastically shifted. It is unclear if it is related to the Google Maps Googlebomb algorithm update or something else.

We have tons of local SEOs reporting major shifts in the local results including Mike Blumenthal who said the location results are screwy, showing examples of how Google is having issues with showing your current location when searching. But it goes beyond that, it seems that even when the location is set properly, the local results displayed in the web search results are off.

Linda Buquet in the Local Search Forums said there are now more national organic and less localized organic results showing up in the Google search results. She is noticing so many different changes recently that it is to the point of scary.

Jennifer Slegg asks if this is related to the Google Quality Update or something else? She analyzed the Mozcast features chart showing even that report shows major changes.

But Mozcast shows changes from the 15th and it seems, based on what I am seeing, the changed didn’t start until the 23rd or 24th of May, which was well after the 15th and shortly after Google’s apology.

Google said then:

We’ve started to update our ranking system to address the majority of these searches—this will gradually roll out globally and we’ll continue to refine our systems over time.

I suspect whatever we are seeing in Google’s local results now, is directly related to this Google Maps bomb.

We have asked Google for a comment on these changes and will report back when we hear something on the record.

Postscript: See our later story named Google Won’t Say If Google Local Changes Due To Googlebomb Fix.

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Like many other areas of marketing, SEO incorporates elements of science. It becomes problematic for everyone, though, when theories that haven't been the subject of real scientific rigor are passed off as proven facts. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Stone Temple Consulting's Mark Traphagen is here to teach us a thing or two about the scientific method and how it can be applied to our day-to-day work.

Becoming Better SEO Scientists Whiteboard

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard.

Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Mozzers. Mark Traphagen from Stone Temple Consulting here today to share with you how to become a better SEO scientist. We know that SEO is a science in a lot of ways, and everything I'm going to say today applies not only to SEO, but testing things like your AdWords, how does that work, quality scores. There's a lot of different applications you can make in marketing, but we'll focus on the SEO world because that's where we do a lot of testing. What I want to talk to you about today is how that really is a science and how we need to bring better science in it to get better results.

The reason is in astrophysics, things like that we know there's something that they're talking about these days called dark matter, and dark matter is something that we know it's there. It's pretty much accepted that it's there. We can't see it. We can't measure it directly. We don't even know what it is. We can't even imagine what it is yet, and yet we know it's there because we see its effect on things like gravity and mass. Its effects are everywhere. And that's a lot like search engines, isn't it? It's like Google or Bing. We see the effects, but we don't see inside the machine. We don't know exactly what's happening in there.

An artist's depiction of how search engines work.

So what do we do? We do experiments. We do tests to try to figure that out, to see the effects, and from the effects outside we can make better guesses about what's going on inside and do a better job of giving those search engines what they need to connect us with our customers and prospects. That's the goal in the end.

Now, the problem is there's a lot of testing going on out there, a lot of experiments that maybe aren't being run very well. They're not being run according to scientific principles that have been proven over centuries to get the best possible results.

Basic data science in 10 steps

So today I want to give you just very quickly 10 basic things that a real scientist goes through on their way to trying to give you better data. Let's see what we can do with those in our SEO testing in the future.

So let's start with number one. You've got to start with a hypothesis. Your hypothesis is the question that you want to solve. You always start with that, a good question in mind, and it's got to be relatively narrow. You've got to narrow it down to something very specific. Something like how does time on page effect rankings, that's pretty narrow. That's very specific. That's a good question. Might be able to test that. But something like how do social signals effect rankings, that's too broad. You've got to narrow it down. Get it down to one simple question.

Then you choose a variable that you're going to test. Out of all the things that you could do, that you could play with or you could tweak, you should choose one thing or at least a very few things that you're going to tweak and say, "When we tweak this, when we change this, when we do this one thing, what happens? Does it change anything out there in the world that we are looking at?" That's the variable.

The next step is to set a sample group. Where are you going to gather the data from? Where is it going to come from? That's the world that you're working in here. Out of all the possible data that's out there, where are you going to gather your data and how much? That's the small circle within the big circle. Now even though it's smaller, you're probably not going to get all the data in the world. You're not going to scrape every search ranking that's possible or visit every URL.

You've got to ask yourself, "Is it large enough that we're at least going to get some validity?" If I wanted to find out what is the typical person in Seattle and I might walk through just one part of the Moz offices here, I'd get some kind of view. But is that a typical, average person from Seattle? I've been around here at Moz. Probably not. But this was large enough.

Also, it should be randomized as much as possible. Again, going back to that example, if I just stayed here within the walls of Moz and do research about Mozzers, I'd learn a lot about what Mozzers do, what Mozzers think, how they behave. But that may or may not be applicable to the larger world outside, so you randomized.

We want to control. So we've got our sample group. If possible, it's always good to have another sample group that you don't do anything to. You do not manipulate the variable in that group. Now, why do you have that? You have that so that you can say, to some extent, if we saw a change when we manipulated our variable and we did not see it in the control group, the same thing didn't happen, more likely it's not just part of the natural things that happen in the world or in the search engine.

If possible, even better you want to make that what scientists call double blind, which means that even you the experimenter don't know who that control group is out of all the SERPs that you're looking at or whatever it is. As careful as you might be and honest as you might be, you can end up manipulating the results if you know who is who within the test group? It's not going to apply to every test that we do in SEO, but a good thing to have in mind as you work on that.

Next, very quickly, duration. How long does it have to be? Is there sufficient time? If you're just testing like if I share a URL to Google +, how quickly does it get indexed in the SERPs, you might only need a day on that because typically it takes less than a day in that case. But if you're looking at seasonality effects, you might need to go over several years to get a good test on that.

Let's move to the second group here. The sixth thing keep a clean lab. Now what that means is try as much as possible to keep anything that might be dirtying your results, any kind of variables creeping in that you didn't want to have in the test. Hard to do, especially in what we're testing, but do the best you can to keep out the dirt.

Manipulate only one variable. Out of all the things that you could tweak or change choose one thing or a very small set of things. That will give more accuracy to your test. The more variables that you change, the more other effects and inner effects that are going to happen that you may not be accounting for and are going to muddy your results.

Make sure you have statistical validity when you go to analyze those results. Now that's beyond the scope of this little talk, but you can read up on that. Or even better, if you are able to, hire somebody or work with somebody who is a trained data scientist or has training in statistics so they can look at your evaluation and say the correlations or whatever you're seeing, "Does it have a statistical significance?" Very important.

Transparency. As much as possible, share with the world your data set, your full results, your methodology. What did you do? How did you set up the study? That's going to be important to our last step here, which is replication and falsification, one of the most important parts of any scientific process.

So what you want to invite is, hey we did this study. We did this test. Here's what we found. Here's how we did it. Here's the data. If other people ask the same question again and run the same kind of test, do they get the same results? Somebody runs it again, do they get the same results? Even better, if you have some people out there who say, "I don't think you're right about that because I think you missed this, and I'm going to throw this in and see what happens," aha they falsify. That might make you feel like you failed, but it's success because in the end what are we after? We're after the truth about what really works.

Think about your next test, your next experiment that you do. How can you apply these 10 principles to do better testing, get better results, and have better marketing? 

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