The most persistent myth in content marketing is that virality is luck. It isn’t. More than a decade after Jonah Berger, marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, published Contagious: Why Things Catch On, his core argument still holds: the reasons people share things follow predictable principles, not chance. Berger distilled those principles into six … Read more

For most of us, “searching” and “Googling” are the same verb. Google handles the overwhelming majority of the world’s queries — well over 80% of the global search market — and it has held that grip for so long that it is easy to forget search had a history before it. Yet the idea of … Read more

Iframes are one of the oldest ways of pulling content from one web page into another, and they remain everywhere: embedded maps, video players, booking widgets, reviews, calculators and third-party tools. The question we set out to answer years ago still matters today — when you iframe content into a page, does Google credit that … Read more

Search engines are an honest mirror. People type into the search bar the questions they would never ask out loud, which makes autocomplete one of the most candid datasets in marketing. So we pointed our International Search team at a simple, slightly cheeky question: what does the rest of Europe actually want to know about … Read more

Does Google crawl rel=”nofollow” links? It is one of the oldest questions in technical SEO, and the answer has changed materially since it was first put to the test. Back in 2015, the Search Laboratory team ran a controlled crawl experiment that produced a clean, confident result. Almost a decade on, Google’s own treatment of … Read more

International expansion is rarely as simple as switching on the same playbook in a new country. Even seasoned multinationals stumble when they assume that what works at home will travel — that a winning proposition, price point or channel mix can be lifted wholesale into an unfamiliar market. It almost never can. Every territory has … Read more

Most marketing metrics move for three different reasons at once: a long-term direction of travel, a repeating seasonal pattern, and random noise that defies neat explanation. When search demand, sales or organic traffic dip, the first question is always the same — is this a genuine decline, or simply the time of year? Time series … Read more