This test was based off of 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 add more to their content to make sure it’s of value to the reader. This will ensure that you will not be penalized for duplicate content. We are doing this test as part of a series showing the iterative testing process. In this test, we check out if the same results would show in the inverse of part 1.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
This is part two, last month, we had the idea of showing iterive testing. Test number which was really weird was in the blockquote, the test page dropped – this was putting content in a blockquote and it drops. What is going on here, was the question, was Google negating that content so it drops because its word count went up? Is Google looking at this as a negative factor – you blockquote something and they demote you.
What I wanted to get people involved in was in what was going on with these things, to help brainstorm. This is part of the testing process. Part one was the blockquote that dropped so we want to run the negative immediately. When we see something that drops quickly, we want to run the test the other way – running in the negative – so that we can then see if we are really dealing with a negative factor at this point – running things the other way to see if it goes up.
Running in the inverse, we actually got it to move up a spot. This is kind of weird, something is going on here with blockquotes that is a potential thing.
Again, keep in mind these are just one way tests. We haven’t run this multiple times, we aren’t getting to statistical significance, but now this is pretty interesting. We put blockquotes on the three and it drops, we put blockquotes on everybody else but not the three, and now it moves up. When you are talking about how tests work and how this whole system that we created works, now we are kind of – this is a bit interesting, it is weird.
Again, we are also at the point where we do not know why. We can speculate - which is a part of the process - why this would happen, why would it not happen, but now we are saying that this is interesting if you’d take content and put it in a blockquote, it would drop. We still could be at the part where it is a word count issue, for sure. It’s a super strong thing, it could be worthwhile removing a keyword there.
Dori: Wouldn’t it consider that content in the blockquote? They have to be reading it, they read accordions and other stuff.
That’s the other thing here, maybe they don’t. Maybe they actually just negate it. You put something on a blockquote and they just wipe it out. That is part of this process that we are seeing. We have this first weird result where it dropped, so we ran it in the inverse and it goes up and that is super weird.
Dori: We have some input here – try putting the keywords in the blockquote to see if they are reading it and we could get something to rank, Tracey says blockquote citation or content from other sources maybe?
I think that was a wonderful softball tossed by Tracey, so the next thing we did was test 330.