Which UK domains gained the highest increase in Google visibility?

In a topsy-turvy year for SEM that saw ‘mobilegeddon’, the rise of machine learning, a shift towards the user experience and the dominance of the Knowledge Graph, let’s see who the eventual winners were in 2015.

IndexWatch has just published its annual visibility index showing which domains were the most successful in riding out the various algorithm storms.

Here are the top five:

1) Quora.com

Giving Google itself a run for its money in terms of being able to answer all of your vital (and not so vital) questions is the crowd-sourced Q&A site Quora.

According to IndexWatch, Quora’s URLs are most impressive and can rank for almost 100 top keywords on Google.

2) Wilko.com

The hardware chain where you can go by a hammer-drill, a packet of screws, some washing up liquid and a panettone is apparently the top domain on the list to benefit from Google’s Phantom update.

The Phantom update was a term given to an acknowledged update to Google’s core algorithm around 5 March last year that saw many websites lose between 20% – 60% of their visibility. The exact changes made to the algorithm remain a mystery.

3) MentalFloss.com

After a change from www.Mentalfloss.com to just Mentalfloss.com, the general upward trend of visibility for the humorous trivia site was replaced by an even bigger upward trend in the middle of 2015.

4) Zomato.com

Zomato provides exactly the kind of information that Google looks for when it serves localised results to hungry searchers, being as it contains restaurant reviews, user ratings, photos and scans of menus in varying degrees of quality.

Much of its improved visibility success was down to Zomato’s purchase of urbanspoon.com, the content of which redirected to zomato.com from June 2015.

5) Wayfair.com

US based ecommerce business Wayfair Inc began its UK operations in 2010, and according to the index is another site that benefited from the Phantom update.

The remaining top 20 looks like this:

6) avclub.com +122,83%
7) encyclopedia.com +119,09%
8) spotify.com +117,71%
9) slate.com +117,06%
10) grammarist.com +108,69%
11) cinemablend.com +104,63%
12) rogerebert.com +104,34%
13) etonline.com +101,67%
14) macmillandictionary.com +97,10%
15) macworld.co.uk +96,62%
16) cambridge.org +88,40%
17) authoritynutrition.com +85,38%
18) musixmatch.com +82,25%
19) elle.com +80,37%
20) sainsburys.co.uk +79,86%

Visit the Sistrix blog to check out the full top 100.

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