Make your SEO experiments work
Friday, January 9, 2009 9:53
Knowledge from successful SEO experiments has always separated good SEO consultants from industry leading professionals. Every agency or professional always has some “proprietary knowledge” that gives them the edge over others.
The very nature of SEO and complexity of Google ranking algorithm means that there are always things where SEO experiments can help improve your SEO program.
My five golden rules of SEO experiments are:
- Make sure you understand what you are trying to achieve.
- Setup a control / benchmark either with your clients or your recent experience
- Experiment with a big enough sample size. The bigger the test, the more accurate the data.
- Document everything - Make sure you store the raw data somewhere, many scientific discoveries in the 20th century comes from looking at data from previous experiments
- Make sense of your results. Although some experiments are a simple yes or no, I’ve always found by publishing your results online means you will get some great comments and criticism from other professionals
Luckily for our industry, there are lots of SEO folks that have kindly shared their research with us. Here are my 3 favourite SEO experiments that have worked well and given useful information. Great work guys, keep sharing the knowledge!
- The effect of sitemaps on crawlers by Casey Henry. I think what he also demonstrated is the importance of getting your site structure right.
- A 6 week full on analysis of Google’s Page Update Life Cycle by Matt Ridout
- Does Google index content inside Flash files
In addition its also worth mentioning websites such as SEO theory which is give lots of food for thought and also Science for SEO for a scientific insight into how search engines work in the way they do.
Coming next week, I will release the Results of LinkRelationships.com’s SEO experiment: The importance of quality over quantity.
Guest post author: Kun Dang
Matt Ridout says:
January 9th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Thanks for the mention, always happy to share findings!
Matt Ridout’s last blog post..Final Page Rank Update 2008
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Alex says:
January 9th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
The problem with Casey Henry’s experiment is that he doesn’t take into account that his test site is a blog. Google AFAIK use a different crawling criteria for this kind of site.
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Mike Reply:
January 18th, 2009 at 8:18 am
Thanks Alex, that’s a good point. Blogs are difficult to crawl efficiently because they have so much repeated content. For example the same post might be on the home page, in a monthly archive and it a page of its own. A lot of the links also generate forms for visitors to fill in, such as for comments. As a result, search engines might use different criteria to crawl blogs. I’ve never heard search engine companies admit it, though, but I have heard Natalie Glance from Nielsen Buzzmetrics (she has now moved to Google) talk about how difficult blogs are to crawl and the fact that they had to code specially for each format.
Anyway, I agree with your point that we shouldn’t assume that what works for blogs also works for other sites.
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Alan Williams says:
January 22nd, 2009 at 7:54 pm
The article was very informative and I hope that I will get such good article in future also. I often read your articles and will also read in future.
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Mike Reply:
January 29th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Thank you very much Alan!
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