We talk a lot about signals but haven’t looked at the underline tag < u >. So we decided to test it out and see if it can move the needle or is it not worth your time?
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We look at a lot of signal and something that occurred to me is we never looked at an underline. It is just something that somehow we have never looked at and I haven’t seen it, so we gave it a go. Is the <u> tag something? Is it a signal that we actually want to consider? One little extra tool for the tool bow. For this particular test, we ran it two ways.
We got it where in test one, the underline tag is on the number three page and the second set, we go the other way, the number here doesn’t have the underline tag on it and all the others do. So the idea is, if we are going to see something that is a positive ranking factor, in the inverse, we expect that page to drop, the middle page to drop, because all the others have the factor and in the first test, we expect the page to move up.
When we are looking at how to combat with issues with Google messing with us, can we actually run tests? Running tests in the inverse is something that gives us a lot of clue about if we are on the right track, if we are doing something that is valid, because Google can have its trickery, but it is really hard to trick in the inverse.
You might say, oh – they are just kind of messing with you again, you can see that movement up but then it is very difficult to reverse trickery and go the other way. The idea is, if we see something that moves up in the first test, it should move down to the second. If we see that, then we feel that we are really on to something.
In this particular case, the results were pretty muddled. The first one, it shifted around a little bit and then it came back to the number three spot. Test two, the no underline tag moved up to the two spots. It seems very unlikely to me that having a word underlined would be a negative factor.
What I think we are seeing here is a no result, meaning, this is a non-factor. We don’t have consistent movement here and especially in this situation, not having the tag moving up tells me that there are other things in play with how the serps work, this is not a particular factor. We do have the one small thing, why would things shift is a good question and something that we have been wrestling with for the last several months – why things shift when nothing is changed.
We will see that there are control pages, which are pages that are exactly the same, they will move. They will stay settled for a good stretch of time but there is something that will move them. Why does that happen? One particular idea is the idea of minute random variance. Google forces rank in pages that are identical and then it forces that rank and sets rank by randomly assigning small value to the end of whatever particular page score or rank score for particular pages.
This could be a good example of that. All these pages, as far as Google is concerned, are seen as identical and then, they simply order rerank according to that random variance. There is one other thing to consider – the underline tag is so faint that it can’t beyond the heavier signals that are present. In this particular test case is we have the keyword in the URL, in the h1, and in the meta.
Those three signals could be so strong that they are so much noise that they are hiding the strength of the <u> tag. That is something that we could then expand out and test. So at a minimum, what we could say for sure is that this isn’t a very strong signal, in fact, it is a weak signal at best, and we can do one more test. We cannot say 100% that the <u> tag is not a signal that Google is looking at, but we can say at best right now that it is extremely week.