This is part of a rerun of a June 2018 test (Test 204: Do HTML IDs or Classes Affect Rank?) which looks into whether keyword stuffing IDs and Classes affect rank. The result of which was that keywords in classes did, but ids did not. I believe on an SEO Fight Club show, it’s been shown that large companies like to name their classes and ids with keywords - so does it actually make a difference?
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This one is, is the ID tag a ranking factor? If you don't know, in your HTML, if you're into that kind of thing, you can actually go in there and put ID tags inside of your code.
Let's take this example here that Jo used. It is a div tag but normally it would just have this here right there. You can pretty much put this in every of the tags that you want to. You can do ID. You can do class. You can do titles on a lot of these.
Depending on the tag, obviously, but you can add a whole lot of stuff to them. What Jo did was test if actually Google would read that and say that that is going to be a ranking factor. He set it up in two ways. Ten pages - two with the tag in it and then without. Then, eight with and two without them.
The result of his test was – he kinda did the same problem that we all have had: getting his testing pages hass become a pain. But I think that's worldwide with everybody. Even on "real sites" indexing is a pain. You can see this affected Jo's tests.
On this one here, it's the reverse. Eight with and two without. So, the T's here all have the keyword tag. Then, the two have without, as it explains to me. He cited in here, it's like it's tested positive but if there's so many then these ones don't and these are all mixing in the middle, just looking at his graph it makes it a little bit harder to definitively say, yes, you can do it.
The test is broken so he's going to retest it and we like sharing these because it's obvious that not every test is going to be any value to you or the value is you see how not to do it next time. If I was doing this I probably would have skipped the reverse.
Then, I would do five with it five without. That way, you can see more of a pattern trend there. In my view, you would see more of a pattern but clearly the way he did it as well and the way that his visualizations work you can see it's a toss-up.
I still am using this function here inside of code, in particular, with images. So, you have your alt tags and then I also put the keywords in the title tags of the images and that helps with SEO and accessibility. Don't write those off just yet and wait for Jo to retest that in a better way to see if we can come with some good stuff. In the dossier, you can see a little bit more clear insights so make sure you take the time to read Jo's opinion.