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

MajestySEO said:

Most replies here are saying the same thing: relevance matters more than DR. But here's a test I actually ran.
for a casino site, I tested sidebar PBN links against links placed inside the article. The links came from the same PBN network and similar sites.
The surprising part was that the sidebar links worked better. The in-content links barely moved the rankings.
So it wasn't simply "contextual links are better." In this test, the sidebar links gave better results.
Obviously, this was one test on one site, so I wouldn't treat it as a rule. but it's a good reminder that common SEO assumptions don't always match what you see in testing.

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SEO Sparton said:

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.

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MajestySEO said:

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.

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SEO Sparton said:

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.

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whimsyink said:

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.

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Moxiepac said:

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.

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