I recently conducted a little SEO experiment involving 3 simple web pages. All were identical except for the TITLE and META DESCRIPTION tags and feature an invented keyword: "webtrafficexperiment1". The first page has an empty title and description (you can find it HERE). The second page has correctly formatted title and description (you can find it HERE). And the third page has nonsense title and description (you can find it HERE). The only links to the pages were from a post at my blog titled "What's in a name?" - my blog is well indexed by the major SEs and is crawled quite regularly. As predicted; Google has placed the correctly formatted Web page at the top of its results. However, Yahoo gives weight to the page with the nonsense title and description, and MSN hasn't even indexed the pages. My question is: How / Why has this happened? Any comments that might help me to understand the different results will be greatly appreciated. T
Nice little experiment but I think there is a flaw in the methodology. In order to gain an accurate insight you need to change a single factor (title OR meta) You changed both for each page. (nice little blog by the way - just added it to my feeds)
Yeah good idea but like Rob syays experiments should only change one variable at a time, funny how Yahoo ranks the bad one anyway, total shock.....not.
It seems to me that only one page out of three is indexed by yahoo and it is listing it only in serps. Or it could have dropped the correct second page???????? Google has two pages but gives more importance to the correct page. Thats the greatness of the Big G.
I would have liked to see "webtrafficexperiment1" versus "webtrafficexperiment1 webtrafficexperiment1 webtrafficexperiment1". I wonder if spamming keywords is useful?
I'm sure Yahoo would have given the most weight to that one. Seen this many times in yahoo results. Title tag spam seems to work well there.
Even if Yahoo could be somewhat "tricked" as we can see from this experiment, I don't know if anyone would care to index good in Yahoo and be blown away by the "Big G" It would be interesting to see more such experiments in the neat future. Regards
To be honest gang, for me many of these types of 'experiments' – much like SOE contest – are on non-competitive and sometime non-existent terms. You will see much different results towards your activities depending on the market segment and the competitiveness of a given term. What is we’re after here? Google is King – there is nothing about a meta description that a few quality back links won’t overcome in short order. Yahoo the Queen – Yahoo does seem to like – Title – Meta Description – On page Prominence factors. Still nothing a few MORE quality backlinks wouldn’t solve either though In the end, the time spent on the experiment could have been better spent doing – you guessed it – some link building – lol . Try to think of stuff like this as TWEAKING. Once the on-site work is done.. once the link building campaigns are on the go… once you have done most of the more important aspects… come back to it. Put up your targeted texts and get on with it.. IMHO of course