This test was done as a follow-up to one of James Goldsmith’s tests regarding the value of linking out to Wikipedia and its effect on rankings. Naturally, that test, like all tests, raised some more questions. With the increasing implementation of schema in websites, we wanted to know if adding sameAs schema with the Wikipedia link would result in an increase in rank. This test is one of several where we placed the link into various schema types.
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So, if you guys remember James Goldsmith he's running, doing a lot of tests with putting links on content and seeing if an outbound link improves or reduces rankings just for it being there. He did one with Wikipedia not too long ago that we highlighted and we wanted to see if adding sameAs schema with the Wikipedia link would rank or lower a page.
Here's the schema that we put on there and then we validated it to make sure everything was good. The initial test, the test page was down here and then it's winds up to the top three and then he did a reverse so that page didn't get schema and the rest of those did and that page dropped all the way down to the bottom.
So, I think it is pretty safe to call this inconclusive like just because it was there it didn't really matter. It went up and that increase in rank would be significant to a lot of people but didn't go up a lot or was it just that we changed the keyword density because we added some code into it and then Google's looking at a different way. Maybe that play with it. I think this supports my argument though that just having a schema alone does not help you. Like, just having it.
Just the fact that it is there does not give you your rankings boost. It's having the right schema and applying it as well as another factor which I still haven't tested that completely yet but my guess is -- or my hypothesis is that schema helps you because the more you add, the more you flesh it out the better your keyword density is making your page more relevant. That's why we're getting the benefit of schema.
This test and a couple of others that we did with schema show that along the same line. So, looking forward to proving my hypothesis. I'll be presenting on that at SEO Spring Training. You will get all the test results before that goes live as well.