Test 376: Is Article Schema a Ranking Factor?

This test was done purely to see if the presence of the article schema in itself would be enough to boost rank. Should you put it in your pages? We check if it does boost or maybe not.

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Test 376 - Is article schema a ranking factor? We're gonna test some more of these. James and there's another tester, she wants to look at this too.  Actually, she's starting one on video  schema. Which schema setups will actually help boost your ranking because when there's a lot of plugins out there that promote schema as this magic button. That's how they were sold and then that schema was the all powerful ranking tool.

We wanted to look at is it having it a ranking factor. And obviously, there's some optimization stuff and some questions. But it's done just to see if this schema just being there is actually a ranking factor. So that's the page. This is the schema - general article schema. Really basic. Just kind of person, places, thing and stuff.

The page actually dropped one box and then dropped to last place and then stayed in the last place so the test result is that having this schema did not itself rank the page. However, even the tester admits that there's some things that we need to look at. 1) that I would say right off the bat is keyword density. All this extra code may have lowered the keyword density of the test page when compared to the unique control pages. And this is something that Ted Kubaitis pointed out.

We were testing keyword optimization or a keyword density and we're adding all  extra code but we don't adjust for that in the control pages so that may have been an issue why the page dropped from the rest of these. 2) There's the other thing is I don't think it's three weeks.

So probably two weeks, maybe three weeks. It could be time. So they change the page and then maybe later it would have bumped up. I'm not necessarily sure  that would be the case or not. But I have seen it where I do on page changes and it takes three weeks to kick in and then I get a result. This is one of those on page changes that I would do is that schema to.

So those two things could certainly mess with the test result in my opinion. So the tester is  gonna continue to be that and we're gonna continue to implementing these and see what we see again. Keyword density is my guess is what might be messing with this but you certainly can use schema to boost up your matches and stuff if you're using a tool like surfer SEO, POP, or CORA.

You need to find some more stuff to add this is certainly a way to do it. This one is still there but we do know just by having it this doesn't necessarily give you a boost as people were selling in their sales letters. So it is a way to set yourself apart. But it's gotta be right and all the other stuff goes into play with that as well.