16 SEO Experiments with Surprising Results That Will Change How You Do SEO

[Linda Buquet]

Bryan Heckler shared this SEO Sherpa post at our Google+ Pro community.

When he commented: "+Linda Buquet - easily one of the best pieces of SEO content I've ever read." I knew it was something I had to share here.

16 SEO Experiments And Their (Surprising) Results

How do you decipher the SEO myths from the matter and the hear say from the fact?

You turn to science, that’s what!

BONUS: Download every single SEO experiment contained in this post as a handy PDF guide you can print out or save to your computer.

In this post I’m going to share with you 16 amazing SEO experiments that will challenge what you thought to be true about search engine optimisation.

I’d even go as far as to predict these SEO studies will change the way you do SEO forever.

Are you ready? Because, everything is about to change for you. Yes?

Above is just a snippet, so head over to read the rest.
If Bryan says it's good - it is!

FYI, I have not been able to cross promote content between here and the Pro community due to my broken hand, so you guys are really missing out if you are reading posts both here and there!

What's your fav experiment or tip?

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[James Watt]

Interesting. There was a post just a day or two ago asking about giant link lists for roofers, looks like one of the experiments here directly relates. 'Common Sense' would tell me that getting a link on a page with thousands of other links is a waste, but I've seen in my own competitive research that industry links like that seem to be common for top ranking businesses in the industries I've looked at too. I still feel like I'd rather build back-links in other ways though, but that might be just a misplaced bit of professional pride.

Getting more images with good alt tags for backlinks is an interesting thought I hadn't considered much. Combined with the 'only the first link counts' experiment, I suppose that means if you're getting attributed as an author or something, you should pick either your image or a link, and not both?

The heavy boost for exact match anchor text is interesting too, though my understanding is that the anchor text diversity penalty is from Penguin, which isn't real time yet (?) so... maybe it has more juice, but maybe you're opening yourself up to a penalty a few months down the line (and I imagine that'd be really hard to track?) I know nothing about the intricacies of Penguin and penalty tracking though, so maybe Marie or someone else will see this and weigh in.

Lastly, I'm not all that surprised that no-follow and outbound links (to authority content) have some (though not as much) positive boost. Also not surprised by the duplicate content, since the whole news industry seems to revolve around dozens of virtually identical stories hitting the wires at once, and google seems to pick the winner based on site authority, so... that seems to match up there.

Thanks for sharing Linda! I had it open yesterday but couldn't wade in. Still feeling under the weather, and that article definitely takes more than the twitter-sized level of focus I was ready to bring to the table last night. Glad you reminded me to dive in this morning!

 

[mborgelt]

Lots of great info thank for sharing. I have read in the search quality doc that external links to relevant sources help establish authority but I had never seen it in action.