Clint has been a part of several conversations with various SEOs talking about using hidden content to rank pages in Google. While there are some hidden content methods that Google has specifically said don’t work, John Mueller is also on record saying that there are plenty of situations where hidden content being present is acceptable, if not even expected. There are plenty of HTML tags in the specification that do not directly display content to a user, template is one of them.
In this test, we check if the use of the template HTML tag to hide content help in increasing rank.
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Transcription below:
Clint: First one, Is there any effect that updating small bits of content on a page? And what this test is, the basic crust of this test is basically, you have a piece of content, let's say you wrote something about the best way to tie your shoes, and it was ranking number one, and then it drops to number three. And you want to get it back up to the number one position, obviously because you're enjoying the traffic and stuff that came with it, we don't want to do a whole lot of work. Can you just go in and find a section of the website, like the first paragraph, the first 100 words of the paragraph, or 100 words of the content, and just update that and see your rankings increase? And so Hunter did this test for me set it all up, you can read the test setup yourself, I won't insult your intelligence, pretty much the same way we do it always. And you can see where it started out. And then you can see where it finished, Marie changed this on me. But do see where it finished? So here's where the two pages that Hunter was changing the small sections of the content. And then at the end of their tests, this is the results he got. So you can see just by looking at the images, it jumped up significantly. This one, I guess is kind of proportionate, right? So what is that 123456 at 6 positions from just changing it. And then this one went up also six positions proportionately, so 123456. Which is a pretty interesting. So really at the end result of this test is that making small changes actually do have a positive effect.
So how do you apply that to your own business and your own website. So what you can do in particular if you followed Dori, did her on page course, and I'm sure some other people have talked about this as creating evergreen content versus creating a new style type of website, unless you have a new style website. But for the most of us, we don't have any new sites. You create evergreen content, that really all you have to do is go in there and update either per season or quarter or monthly, just depending on how the the market changes in your particular niche. And you don't have to redo the entire thing. You just update small sections of it, that you want to make things right, maybe fix some grammar stuff, etc. And you're going to see a boost in the traffic, relative to where your position was in the first place. So in particular, if you did all this work to get an evergreen article, ranking number one, and six months later, it's done. And number three, just go try to change the paragraph and see if that knocks you out up really quick. And changing or rearranging words or rewriting one paragraph is actually pretty easy process, take you 5-10 minutes tops to reorganize a paragraph, it's a decent result for 5-10 minutes of work. So go do this.
Dori: Do we know what kind of changes he made? I mean literally just like changing a paragraph it wasn't in SEO type thing.
Clint: Yeah, because it's lorem ipsum and he just switched. The paragraph is literally just changed up. The thing he didn't do it again, there's no scientific thing you just kept made sure the density was the same and went on the time.
Dori: So Google rewards updates. We used to do that when we used to publish a lot of huge content sites, wouldn't impact in the cloaking days, and we would just republish them. And so it changed, you know, I mean republish the content in them. It was an automated system. And we always got rewarded for that. So that was part of our SOP, you know, that we always did. So I'm glad to know that Google still rewarding that change, you know, those small little changes.