What’s one SEO experiment you ran recently that gave you a surprising result?

[MajestySEO]

Interesting test. But I wouldn’t say that sidebars links are always stronger.

If you have a PBN network, page authority, indexing, placement of the link, internal links, and many other aspects can affect the result.

But I agree that the results of your tests matter more than some “contextual is always better” rule.

yes I agree but did I say that sidebar links are "always" stronger?
I was just sharing what happened in this test becuase the result was opposite to what I expected.

 

[SEO Sparton]

yes I agree but did I say that sidebar links are "always" stronger?
I was just sharing what happened in this test becuase the result was opposite to what I expected.

Fair enough, you never did say that they were “always” stronger.

I was just taking a wider view of the SEO implications of that particular result.

Nice test though, real-life results like that are precisely what makes me prefer to test different link placement options.

 

[MajestySEO]

Fair enough, you never did say that they were “always” stronger.

I was just taking a wider view of the SEO implications of that particular result.

Nice test though, real-life results like that are precisely what makes me prefer to test different link placement options.

Haha fair enough
Now you got me thinking... next time I will try the link in the footer and see if google likes that even more.

 

[SEO Sparton]

this is a great reminder that DR should not be considered everything in one go. i have also been considering whetther or not the site really gets any search traffic nd whether or not the page is rellevant. sometimes, a small site is better than a large site when it comes down to relevance.

That’s right. DR serves as a reference, but I’ve never used it on its own.

I would review organic traffic, ranking keywords, topic relevancy, page level metrics, and referring domains quality.

A small and relevant website with actual traffic can have more value than a high DR website with no traffic at all.

 

[Moxiepac]

Good thread. My most surprising one was the opposite of building anything new.

I had a niche blog where three separate posts were all targeting closely related long-tail keywords, basically cannibalising each other. None of them could break into the top 5, and I kept assuming I just needed more links.

On a hunch I merged all three into one longer, better organised page and 301'd the old URLs to it. Expected a small bump. Instead the merged page hit position 2 within about six weeks and pulled in more traffic than the three posts ever did combined.

The surprising part wasn't that consolidation worked, it was how much the cannibalisation had been holding everything back. Google seemed genuinely confused about which page to rank before.

Lesson I took from it: before creating anything new, check whether your own site is competing with itself first.

 

[SEO Sparton]

Good thread. My most surprising one was the opposite of building anything new.

I had a niche blog where three separate posts were all targeting closely related long-tail keywords, basically cannibalising each other. None of them could break into the top 5, and I kept assuming I just needed more links.

On a hunch I merged all three into one longer, better organised page and 301'd the old URLs to it. Expected a small bump. Instead the merged page hit position 2 within about six weeks and pulled in more traffic than the three posts ever did combined.

The surprising part wasn't that consolidation worked, it was how much the cannibalisation had been holding everything back. Google seemed genuinely confused about which page to rank before.

Lesson I took from it: before creating anything new, check whether your own site is competing with itself first.

Absolutely agree. Cannibalization is often underestimated because there is an impulse to create more backlinks or content.

In some cases, the biggest boost in rankings can be achieved by consolidating all the existing content on one page.