James thought that it might be a good idea to test to see if linking out from a bio to an authentic LinkedIn profile might be a ranking factor. There is much talk about trust signals and EAT, so he thought that this might be a good one to test.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
Test 389: Can a bio linked to a valid Linkedin account increase rank? This is James. He is doing a bunch of things or he's testing does it really matter where you're linking out to? This is the second or third test he's done in that series and here he's checking if it matters if you link out to your LinkedIn page.
One of the things that I noted that he was trying to do is to see if that would pass a trust signal and EAT and that's what he put in his background information. However, I think in this environment, in the single variable environment, it's really hard to test that EAT thing because you're putting it on essentially brand new sites, right? Brand new sites and brand new pages.
There's no authority, no trust and certainly no expertise unless you're testing Latin. And you're looking for expertise in Latin. And if we're using Lorem Ipsum, he knows what we're saying all right. So I think the EAT thing is a bit of a stretch but this is really one of those tests that probably actually can serve well in a real world environment as well.
Where you take your about me page or your bio page, if you have a separate one on your website, and test whether using the LinkedIn or using your Facebook page, using your YouTube or whatever is going to improve the EAT signal. So a little bit harder the test in a real world environment than it is in a single variable but you get a little bit better results, in my opinion, just based off of the application of what the heck you're trying to go after.
So here you see he added the LinkedIn bio. He did it right here with the link profile link. And then his control pages, he had the bio and just didn't have... if you see here he's missing the the link to LinkedIn.
As you see from the images he added and it went down. It went down some more, went back up and then ultimately went back down again. Like he's saying in his applications and in analysis and implications section right here, in may not be a factor or it could be just how he placed it. Like his bio placement; does that cause issues? He literally put the bio in there, did that change the way the rest of the page worked? He did okay by adding the word count so he kept the keyword ratio the same.
But maybe because he did the lorem ipsum and then his bio was in English, could that have caused this little thinker thing too? So there's a lot of questions in here. If this was Mythbusters, I would say inconclusive. And that's pretty much the assumption that James came up with too is inconclusive on this one.
Again I think these are probably better off tested in a real-world but we'll have to find some keyword sets that we can actually start going after that are easier to rank in a real world that way we're not spinning wheels try to emulate this with the single variable model.