Category Dilution Experiment - Volunteers

[WilliamGMBE]

We are trying to run a very detailed experiment to see if category dilution(more categories-reduction in ranking) is a real thing or not.

Many companies (and people) swears it is a real thing, while many experiment shows the opposite. So for this purpose we are trying to run a very detailed experiment on multiple GBP's to see if Category Dilution is an issue in 2025.

We where wondering if anyone else would like to join in this experiment. This is what we are looking for:

• A few volunteers who can has GBP where they are comfortable changing the number of categories.
• This is what we expect the volunteers to do:
  • Start with 1 category on day 1 and keep for a week. Then add 4 secondary categories to it and stay for another week. Then add another 5 categories and stay for a week. At the end we will be moving it back to 1 category for another week. We will be adding 4 day gaps between these changes for ranking changes to make impact.
  • Record your admin analytics every week. We can coordinate everything thing with you.
  • The experiment should take around 45 days.
• Some criteria for the GBP we want to run this experiment on:
  • Should have atleast a little bit of traffic so the data is cleaner.
  • Other than the category changes, the GBP should be left idle.

The above is all we expect the volunteers to do. From our side we do plan to run very detailed ranking measurement on the selected GBP to see how the category addition impacts ranking. We do not need API access to your GBP or anything, we can run analytics with out. We are already running it with a couple of GMB, but wanted better data and hence making this call for volunteers.

Anyone here(or companies) interested to join? At the end we do hope to publish the experiment data in a transparent manner. We also will be happy to give a shout out and backlink to the volunteers on our domain(GMBEverywhere) when we publish it. We will also be happy to share our testing plan with you if you need it before making the decision to volunteer.

Anyone interested in participating? Please do let us know here or you can DM here on the platform