Observation Needed Ranking Factors

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OnPage Factors

Test # Test Title Test Result

58 User Metrics: Is Time on While we obtained positive movement, it’s not conclusive that it was because of time on site alone and
Site a Ranking Factor? could have been because there were more visits to the page than the other test pages.

82 What is the Optimum Undetermined - we had difficulty seeing a trend in the test results.

Anchor Text Percentage

Post Penguin 4 Update?

83 What is the Best Way to Links from body and footer pass more juice, but there were ‘mistakes’ in the test setup that may have
Pass Internal Link Juice affected the results. Although, these mistakes lead us to discoveries about MOZ’ and Majestic’s workings.
from the Homepage

126 Does Putting the Target We like MainEntityOfPage as it is a good practice when using schema. Unfortunately, we

Keyword in the can’t say for certain that it will improve your ranking.

MainEntityOfPage Schema

Affect Rank?

127 Looking for a Schema We can’t say for certain that it will improve your ranking. Nevertheless, we recommend using this schema

Hack: Putting a Target type on your pages.

Keyword in SearchAction

Schema

130 Ecommerce Test 2: More No clear winner. The SERPs never moved, but it could be because of the way the test was set up.
Content or More Products
on Category Page?

141 Building a Wall to Test Unfortunately, this test didn’t work out as planned. The first difficulty came when attempting to change

Different Ranking Factors URLs. This muddied the search results for about 19 days. The second challenge came when we sent the

Against Each Other first lot of links from a Google Doc with 17 pages dropping from the index. However, despite these hiccups,

this test showed that the Title tag and keyword density are strong on-page ranking factors.

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OnPage Factors

Test # Test Title Test Result

149 Will a Page with Keywords Possibly.We don’t want to say 100% certain that strong is a better signal than bold as there are some
Tagged as Strong Outrank results here that give a little doubt.
a Page with Keywords
Tagged as Bold?

159 Does a Second Internal Not conclusive.Based on the latest results, the initial #1 ranking page is not indexed and the rest of the

Link Housed in a Shortener results have moved up one place.
Result in More Juice Being
Passed to the Page?

170 Will a Longer H1 Zone Most likely but not close to conclusive.Avoid one word or exact match H1 zones when possible. A

Positively Affect Rank? descriptive H1 containing your target keyword is a good start

218 Do You Need a Unique Inconclusive.The new canonical page has indexed and, surprisingly, is sitting in the #2 spot. Since a
Page for a Canonical to canonical is meant to tell Google which page you want to show in the search results, this could mean that
Pass Juice Google ignores the canonical if the new page is different enough from the target of the canonical. See Test
#234.

268 Are Hidden Headings Tags No But possible flawed test. Hidden headings did not provide a ranking boost. It is likely that it is a result of
(H2, H3) Ranking Factors? a flawed test setup and they may indeed be a ranking factor.

271 Is the Sentiment Word Likely. Although the results weren’t as conclusive as we’d like, I think there is something here.

“Best” a Ranking Factor?

288 Does Getting a Link From a Inconclusive. Too early to call. The fact that both pages have dropped to the bottom could be transitional
Page with Schema Pass rank, with these pages jumping to the top in the weeks to come. See Test #196 for follow up.
Through More Juice?

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OnPage Factors

Test # Test Title Test Result

291 Does a < div > Tag Make a Random variance. Dropped one spot, so slightly negative! Actually, it isn’t. We ran this test multiple times

Difference? and the results are random. Sometimes they go up, sometimes down, sometimes they stay in place.

298 Will A Single Keyword Contaminated SERP.
Instance Index?

307 Does an Exact Match Inconclusive. Because of the indexing issues with Google recently, some of the pages may have not

Anchor Move the Needle cached properly.

More as an H2, H3, H4,

H5, or in the Paragraph?

318 Email Address on the Page Google doesn’t like having an email address on the page. This needs further testing.
as a Ranking Factor

335 Does Having a Question Inconclusive and all pages need to be recrawled and cached again to get more insight.
Mark in the Title Affect
Rankings?

336 Is there a Correlation We can’t single out the factor of having many pages as the one that moves the needle.

Between the Number of

Pages per Topic and

Rankings?

337 Is there a Preferred They are still bouncing aroundso we need to give it more time and check caching and report back.
Number of Images?

349 Do Paragraphs with Less Inconclusive and for retesting.
Sentences Rank Better
Than Pages with Longer
Sentences?

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OnPage Factors

Test # Test Title Test Result
Inconclusive.This could be down to load time or number of calls made.
352 Is Google Tag Manager a
Ranking Factor?

358 Do #Anchor Links Pass The test was inconclusive. Don’t overdoit with the #anchors.
Juice (Linking from the
Same Page to Another It is looking very similar to the image test where .006 to .008 was the sweet spot, here we are looking at a
Place on the Page)? .004 to .007. This test is for retesting.

359 How Many Videos on a
Page is Optimal?

370 [DOMAIN] Will A Link From The results are inconclusive.
An Older Site That Has
Been Hosted Beat A Link
From A Newer Site?

371 [DOMAIN] What Site Has Results are inconsistent and for rechecking once reindexed.
The Best Linking Power?

378 Does the Number of Words This needs a little longer but I think we will see the shorter sentences finally settle in the first spot.
per Sentence Help with
Rankings?

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OffPage Factors

Test # Test Title Test Result

71 Bounce Rate Hack - Part 2 Test results were inconclusive, unfortunately, as some of the variables were difficult to control.

89 Can You Increase the Inconclusive test results. Test page was back and forth in the SERPs.

Strength of a Link Through

Traffic?

250 Do URL Shorteners Inconclusive. It’s too early to conclude this test. However, what this test has proved is that url shorteners
Improve Rank? are taking longer to get positive impact than authority and .edu links.

279 Re-performing Page Rank Surprisingly, the results for this test show that the pages that should receive the highest page rank under

According to Majestic’s the PageRank formula are ranking the lowest.

Model

310 Re-performing Page Rank They are not in perfect order according to Majestic’s prediction of page rank, but the order is indicative that

According to Majestic’s page rank is still in play.

Model (Continued)

314 Making a case for Minute It is strongly suspected to be the case, but more testing is needed.
Random Variance (a.k.a.
MRV)

341 Google Analytics - Is it a There seems to be a very small difference here, but you would need to run this over a lot more sites to see

factor? it.

352 Is Google Tag Manager a Inconclusive. This could be down to load time or number of calls made.
Ranking Factor?

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