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Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

rankscience.com

51–60 of 88 posts

Re: Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

#51
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

by curiosity, what's the thrid party data source?

That's part of our secret sauce. :)

Re: Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

#52
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain a bit more about the technical details of what the platform can do? Does it integrate with web master tools and google analytics? Does it help identify page populations that are stable and similar enough to be compared? How are the different test versions sent to you guys? Can we use our own CDN on top of your CDN? What about dynamic pages that change over time? How big of a sample size is needed to g…

Howdy etler! > Does it integrate with web master tools and google analytics? Yep! > Does it help identify page populations that are stable and similar enough to be compared? Yep! > How are the different test versions sent to you guys? For the most part, we own the design of treatments. Some of our customers have their own experiments, but that's a small minority of our customers. Happy to talk more in depth about thi…

Thanks for the response! I know the sample size question is hard to answer because of the number of variables involved, but the reason I ask is that the CoderWall blog post example mentioned 20,000 pages, which is more than we have so I was curious about what a rough rule of thumb range might be.

Re: Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

#53
post #38
post #35

Guys, The idea looks great. Congrats on the launch. 2 SEO questions: 1) a CDN means "thousands of websites on one IP address". Google doesn't like it UNTIL it knows, the IP belongs to a well-known CDN like cloundfront/cloudflare etc. Please comment? 2) An A/B test might look like "cloaking" to googles. How exactly do you run it? I assume, not in parallel, but "variation A then variation B" - correct? If yes, does it…

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…

Thanks for the answer.

PS. whoa, exciting (the 'in-between cloudflare and your server' bit)

Re: Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

#54
Just want to chime in here and share that I'm a very happy customer. Ryan, Dillon, and Chad are some super smart guys who deeply understand SEO. I use RankScience for 7 Cups and Edvance360 and I've seen a huge ROI. They always find time to meet with me and my other team members. The advice and feedback they provide is worth the cost of the service alone. Highly, highly, highly recommended!

Re: Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

#55

Co-founder/CTO here. Please share any SEO questions!

- Is there a minimize traffic to the website required to get statistically significant results? Or does it matter since you're trying to move the site up in the Google ranking? - Does site traffic affect the length of time it takes to test?

Re: Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

#57

Co-founder/CTO here. Please share any SEO questions!

- Is there a minimize traffic to the website required to get statistically significant results? Or does it matter since you're trying to move the site up in the Google ranking? - Does site traffic affect the length of time it takes to test?

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.

Re: Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

#59

Just want to chime in here and share that I'm a very happy customer. Ryan, Dillon, and Chad are some super smart guys who deeply understand SEO. I use RankScience for 7 Cups and Edvance360 and I've seen a huge ROI. They always find time to meet with me and my other team members. The advice and feedback they provide is worth the cost of the service alone. Highly, highly, highly recommended!

Thanks Glen!! :)

Re: Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

#60
post #58

That looks great! How do you automate google's rank checking? Do you use proxies/swarm of VPS's?

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.
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