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Your question wasn't very good. The changes suggested need to be made one time in order to affect your site's traffic many times. The changes might make the sit

by slouch 15y ago

Your question wasn't very good. The changes suggested need to be made one time in order to affect your site's traffic many times. The changes might make the site more attractive in search results based on improved snippets. The H tags change could help google better understand the content and rank it for more appropriate searches. If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them. If the end result is 10%, how do you know it wasn't because your users started writing more popular content 4 months after you made the changes?

jshen 15y ago
First, let me reiterate that my site is for fun, and nothing more. But let's assume that it were a business, and I'll explain how my question is not only good, but the most important question a you should ask. We have finite resources and time, and we have to decide what to use those resources and time for. How do we do that? I could implement all of these changes in a 2 days let's say, or I could use that same time and money to add some feature my users have been asking for. Which should I do? To answer that we have to estimate in some way the impact of each. Saying it "might make the site more attractive", "could help google", etc isn't a good answer. "If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them." No it wouldn't, and what I'm offering here is to do the changes and measure the change.
- slouch 15y ago
  I would love to know how you intend to isolate variables during your measurement so that your tests are accurate.
  - jshen 15y ago
    You could never isolate it completely with only a single site, but that doesn't mean you conclude that you can't measure anything, or estimate at all. If I made all the changes in a few days, gave it a few weeks for google to notice the changes, and organic search traffic didn't increase in any noticeable way ... that's strong evidence that it didn't have much of an effect. Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Their gut? Or did they do these things in the past, and measure an improvement, even when they didn't isolate all the variables as you are demanding of me! Why not demand the same from the person making the suggestion?
    - getsat 15y ago
      > Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Fair question. I would say these things are current, accepted "best practices". I'd liken it to suggesting you use a version control system instead of emailing code back and forth. Your existing system might work, but many other people who were also emailing code back and forth are seeing gains using this new-fangled VCS thing, so it's almost definitely worth doing. You might try searching for "SEO before and after" or "SEO case study" to see how on-site changes have worked (or haven't worked!) for other sites. At any rate, many of the current "best practices" are trivial, under the hood changes so it doesn't really cost anything to put them into place. Most of them simply help search engines understand how your content is structured and benefit both you and your users.
      - jshen 15y ago
        yes, I agree with you sort of. I"ve done a lot of SEO in the past, nothing you mentioned was new to me. But here is my experience, one of the startups I did had a brand new domain, which had nothing on it before launch, and didn't hyper optimize the type of SEO you mentioned. However, due to the nature of our site we got a lot of links for big name groups like peta, the nra, etc. Follow links on their site, all within a few months of launching. We ranked really well really fast, whatever sandbox people think google may or may not have didn't seem to affect us. Like I said, within a few months, on a brand new domain, without an SEO expert optimizing things like H1 tags, we ranked really really well for competitive keywords. That's the basis of my hypothesis, without good backlinks, it doesn't matter a whole lot, and good backlinks matter a lot more than tags on a page, whether you have /posts/title, etc. But I do really appreciate the time you took to look at my site and offer suggestions. You did catch a missing index :) I didn't notice because no human goes to tag pages, and it didn't show up in 'new relic' because my other pages are fast and get hit a lot more. btw, i'm curious if you see my site on this search, http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=is+mio+liquid+healthy http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3... I rank decently for long tail things like that, if I did your suggestions would that page go up? I see it in 7th position.
        15y ago

by slouch 15y ago

jshen 15y ago

First, let me reiterate that my site is for fun, and nothing more. But let's assume that it were a business, and I'll explain how my question is not only good, but the most important question a you should ask. We have finite resources and time, and we have to decide what to use those resources and time for. How do we do that? I could implement all of these changes in a 2 days let's say, or I could use that same time and money to add some feature my users have been asking for. Which should I do? To answer that we have to estimate in some way the impact of each. Saying it "might make the site more attractive", "could help google", etc isn't a good answer. "If you want hard numbers, it might take years of data collection and analysis to find them." No it wouldn't, and what I'm offering here is to do the changes and measure the change.

slouch 15y ago
I would love to know how you intend to isolate variables during your measurement so that your tests are accurate.
- jshen 15y ago
  You could never isolate it completely with only a single site, but that doesn't mean you conclude that you can't measure anything, or estimate at all. If I made all the changes in a few days, gave it a few weeks for google to notice the changes, and organic search traffic didn't increase in any noticeable way ... that's strong evidence that it didn't have much of an effect. Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Their gut? Or did they do these things in the past, and measure an improvement, even when they didn't isolate all the variables as you are demanding of me! Why not demand the same from the person making the suggestion?
  - getsat 15y ago
    > Now if someone is going to tell someone else that they should do xyz, what are they basing that on? Fair question. I would say these things are current, accepted "best practices". I'd liken it to suggesting you use a version control system instead of emailing code back and forth. Your existing system might work, but many other people who were also emailing code back and forth are seeing gains using this new-fangled VCS thing, so it's almost definitely worth doing. You might try searching for "SEO before and after" or "SEO case study" to see how on-site changes have worked (or haven't worked!) for other sites. At any rate, many of the current "best practices" are trivial, under the hood changes so it doesn't really cost anything to put them into place. Most of them simply help search engines understand how your content is structured and benefit both you and your users.
    - jshen 15y ago
      yes, I agree with you sort of. I"ve done a lot of SEO in the past, nothing you mentioned was new to me. But here is my experience, one of the startups I did had a brand new domain, which had nothing on it before launch, and didn't hyper optimize the type of SEO you mentioned. However, due to the nature of our site we got a lot of links for big name groups like peta, the nra, etc. Follow links on their site, all within a few months of launching. We ranked really well really fast, whatever sandbox people think google may or may not have didn't seem to affect us. Like I said, within a few months, on a brand new domain, without an SEO expert optimizing things like H1 tags, we ranked really really well for competitive keywords. That's the basis of my hypothesis, without good backlinks, it doesn't matter a whole lot, and good backlinks matter a lot more than tags on a page, whether you have /posts/title, etc. But I do really appreciate the time you took to look at my site and offer suggestions. You did catch a missing index :) I didn't notice because no human goes to tag pages, and it didn't show up in 'new relic' because my other pages are fast and get hit a lot more. btw, i'm curious if you see my site on this search, http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=is+mio+liquid+healthy http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3... I rank decently for long tail things like that, if I did your suggestions would that page go up? I see it in 7th position.
      - 15y ago