This test was based off a post on SEJ that states that Google won’t pay attention to the quotes around content, even duplicate content on your page. In particular, the example is using quotes around a direct quote from another source.
The advice from SEJ is that, if you do quote a source, to be sure to offer more than their content to make sure it’s of value to the reader. This will ensure that you will not be penalized for duplicate content. So, how does Google treat content in a Blockquote? We test that out.
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This test is from Adam, he works with me at HVSEO. What he was looking at is this article from Search Engine Journal. From this article, it talks about Google will ignore something that goes into a quote. If you put it into quotes, it would be ignored especially if it is from another source, in a sense, duplicate content. I guess the idea here is that anything in quotes might be considered duplicate content or other people might be quoting it and it’s just going to be ignored. And so, we started this test.
This is kind of a beginner test and so we’ve got this first part and I placed my email – at the bottom. If there are people out there new to testing, I want to do this one because this is the first step – you can see what this test is, you can replicate it, and then we are going to expand out and if people want to be involved in this process – sort of like, hey - I am brand-new to testing, I’d love to do just an easy one and one that makes sense and does not have a lot of moving parts, this one is perfect.
This is the starter of that and then next month we will carry this through with some other people that are getting involved. You don’t have to get your test published. What I want to do is to get people involved into testing so that they can replicate these tests. This is the first step of that and if this sounds good to you, please contact me and Adam and I will help you set up your version of this test and if you want to take a variation of it.
What ended up happening in this test is that the results were unusual. So, we’ve got our page with quotes in it and it ended up dropping to the bottom. Perhaps that is correct, they are just ignoring what is in there. You would think that if they are ignoring it, they would not have done anything but that would reduce wordcount, perhaps or something like that.
Now, we are at a point of a test where we have the initial result that is not expected and so, we need to expand our thoughts on how we are going to replicate this and then, where are we going with this. That is where this test is at so if somebody would want to get involved in testing, I think this is the right opportunity and this is why we presented this test this way.
Adam has put down some ideas that came to him on why this might have happened and what we can retest. It could be the blockquotes themselves, it could be a wordcount issue, it could be that the blockquote did contain some keywords in it and those were removed so it had a lower exact match keyword count, those are all very possible. We need to see. So, if you want to test, if you want to get into this and see how it works, send me an email.
I think what it was is that, it is entirely plausible that it was ignored. It has essentially taken off that content on your page which is pretty interesting. Because we used a section of the page that had the exact keyword on it, it is now has less exact keywords in it, too compared to the other ones. It could have just dropped because of that which makes a lot of sense.
It also makes a lot of sense actually if this blockquote is actually true which would be surprising cause you would think, if you put something in blockquotes, why would that matter but maybe Google is – you know what, if you put something in blockquotes, a lot of people may be using it so we will just ignore it – which would be interesting.
Dori: That is interesting. I would think that they would give it more attention because it is in blockquotes.
I agree. That was what I was expecting. I was expecting a nothing or a go up, really leaning towards nothing. But seeing this drop. And again, another thing to consider is that this is just variance because we just ran this once which is why we replicate tests. We do this at least two more times and see if they drop every single time and then move on.