SEO Test Results and Case Studies

This week we asked our Twitter followers what they thought would happen when we updated internal links that pointed to URLs with 301 status codes to their 200 status code equivalent. More than half of our followers thought this would have a positive impact on organic traffic: This change actually had no detectable impact on organic traffic. How could that be? Read the full case study below. The Case Study One item in a typical technical SEO audit is to seek out internal links that point to URLs that redirect (have 3XX status codes).

In this week’s #SPQuiz on Twitter, we asked our followers what they thought would happen when we added emojis to title tags for thematic content pages. Here’s what they thought: The largest proportion opted for positive, but it’s fair to say that opinion was evenly split between all three options - there was no intuitive feel among the community for how this test would go. In situations like this, testing is extremely useful so that we know the true impact of a change rather than guessing.

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our followers what they thought happened to organic traffic when a customer added authorship content to improve their pages’ E-A-T signals. Here’s what they thought:  All the votes this week were evenly split between this change having a positive impact or no detectable impact on organic traffic. Were half of the votes right? Or was everyone wrong? Read the full case study below to find out!

This week’s case study highlights a test that involved a client-side script to perform an API request for data that would then be injected onto the page to enhance the page’s content. We asked our twitter followers in our #SPQuiz poll what they suspected the impact to organic traffic would be: Most of the respondents believed there wouldn’t be a detectable impact from this test. Read on to see if they were correct.

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened when a customer tested reformatting their HTML table to regain table snippets in the SERP that they previously owned. This test was run across multiple domains. Here’s what they thought: There was a strong consensus this week, with over 80% of our followers thinking there would be a mix of positive and inconclusive results. Nobody thought the results would be the same across every domain.

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact on organic traffic was when we added dynamic prices to the title tags of a customer’s travel/rental website. Here’s what people thought: The majority of you believe that adding dynamic prices would positively impact organic traffic. At the same time, there was an even split of 20% from the rest of our followers, thinking it would have no detectable or negative impact.

For this week’s #SPQuiz, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought the impact would be when a travel website moved a deals block above their informational content. Here’s what they thought: Over half thought that this would have a positive impact on organic traffic, the rest split evenly between negative and no detectable impact. This change actually had a negative impact on organic traffic! Read the case study below to learn more.

In this week’s ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #SPQuiz, we were tackling the topic of star ratings. We asked our followers whether pulling in the average rating from a third-party review site would have a beneficial impact on SEO performance, in the knowledge that rating rich snippets were being attained in search results. Here’s what they thought: The vast majority of the people who voted thought that this test would have the expected result - a positive impact on organic traffic, and nobody thought it would harm performance.

For the first #SPQuiz of the new year, we asked our Twitter followers what they thought happened to engagement when we changed inline hyperlinks on article pages to be a similar color to that of the surrounding text. Here’s what they thought: Majority of those who voted believe this type of change would result in a negative impact to key engagement metrics, and they were right! Continue to the full case study below for the details on SEO and CRO impact.

We’ve talked about FAQ schema a few times before– you can revisit those posts here, or here. From our testing we have often seen good returns from including FAQ schema even across different industries. In July of last year, we said that “67% of all FAQ schema tests we’ve run have resulted in a positive impact” and since then the trend has continued with most of our recent FAQ tests being positive too.