For this webinar, Clint and Dori discussed the tests and their results from our October dossier. We have a total of 9 tests from 4 testers this month. The first test (Test 642: Will Sending Links To The GMB Share URL Help Increase The Rank Of A Map Listing?) was by Mathew. He remembered seeing this strategy recommended 2 years ago, but he didn't know of any scientific testing that has been done to see if this strategy is really useful. So he decided to run the test and find out once and for all if this strategy is helpful or not.
Jo, on the other hand, tested "Can a page with lower frequency but higher density outrank a page with higher frequency but lower density?".
For James test (Test 646: Can Social Shares Affect Rank?), he wanted to see what the real deal is behind social shares and if it can move a page. He also did a test (Test 647: Do Forum Links Still Work? ) to validate if forum links still work and in Test 649: Can We Tank A Page By Using Blogger As A Buffer Page?, if there's a negative effect from using Blogger as a buffer page.
For Shree's test (Test 648: Will Embedding A YouTube Video On A Page Improve Rankings?), he checked the impact of embedding a YouTube video on a page.
While for Clint's test, he identified multiple zones in the Service Schema and Website Schema that can be used by Google to boost the relevance for a keyword which is being done via keyword density. It will tell us definitively if Google is reading these zones and taking them into account individually for ranking purposes versus using the whole schema as an information tool.
His last test (Test 650: Is Core Web Vitals A Ranking Factor?) was all about core web vitals and if they are a ranking factor. It is a must to check it out. It is a 45 pages test that went into each core web vital to see if they can affect rank, not just the major core web vitals!
Tests this month:
Test 642: Will Sending Links To The GMB Share URL Help Increase The Rank Of A Map Listing?
Test 643: Keyword Density VS Keyword Frequency –Can A Page With Lower Frequency But Higher Density Outrank A Higher Frequency But Lower Density Page?
Test 644: Which Text Areas From Service Schema Are Used By Google For Ranking Purposes?
Test 645: Which Text Areas From Website Schema Are Used By Google For Ranking Purposes?
Test 646: Can Social Shares Affect Rank?
Test 647: Do Forum Links Still Work?
Test 648: Will Embedding A YouTube Video On A Page Improve Rankings?
Test 649: Can We Tank A Page By Using Blogger As A Buffer Page?
Test 650: Is Core Web Vitals A Ranking Factor?
October 2021 Dossier
Transcription below:
Dori: Hey everyone, Dori Friend here with Clint Butler for our October SIA Monthly Test. It's almost Halloween. So I am going to put the PDF in the handout, so I'm going to get rid. Did you already do it?
Clint: No I didn't.
Dori: I just deleted it. Okay, I'll have to put it in again. I was just expecting it to be last month. And yes, this is October, almost December. Looking forward to SEO Rockstars, getting ready. Like I was telling Clint, I have to leave next Thursday, which makes it a little bit tougher for me because I'm going to a wedding in Ohio and I'm leaving straight from Ohio to SEO Rockstars, so I have to have everything done. So I'm a little scatterbrained right now. But I am going to upload that PDF. While Clint takes it away.
Clint: Yup, PDFs uploaded for everybody. There's a whopping 2 attendees, guys are missing out. Coming to these things alives is one of the benefits of your membership, you get a chance to ask us questions, especially Dori when we're otherwise not available to you.
Dori: I see 4 attendees, there's two staff members, so that's a total of 6 people. This is this is one of our all time highs. No, just kidding.
Clint: Alrighty, so no test in September, right? So we kind of have to kill it for you guys this month. You see the test list right there. So let's go ahead and get right into it. First one is by a new tester, Matthew Bennett "Will sending links to the GMB share URL will help increase map ranking?" So if you don't know you can go to any GMB and then there's a share function there and there's a shortened URL or you can embed or you can click that shortened URL, and it'll get a longer version of the URL to be a redirect. And what Matthew wanted to test was if he sent links to those, would that boost rankings for the map and the GMB listing. So, the setup is pretty straightforward. When he picked as the maps and then sent the links, there's the image of the link that he used in particular. And here is the anchor text and the results that he used for those for his test. So his first one there, started in position 14 and went up to 12. It's not too bad. And that's using the brand name in there, instead of exact match, right? And then the other ones were exact match or partial match, in particular paying attention to the area that the map was in. And it actually brought the map down, which is pretty interesting because I've been a proponent of using anchor text, in particular. A lot of brand when you're sending links now. It's kind of Google's catching on a little bit to anchor text, when you're using keywords inside of them. So it's kind of consistent to what I thought was gonna happen. But the scripts of Matthew proving that links to that share URL, maybe you need to think that out a little bit better. And if you're using tools to send, you know, 100 links with 100 different anchor texts, you might not be dealing what you think you're doing. So that's pretty cool. I'm looking forward to seeing some more tests from Matthew as he goes along and builds his portfolio of tests. So I think the next one would be CID, we need to put that one to bed whether it's working or not. Some people say it is, some people say it isn't. So this is a good test. And I appreciate and looking forward to seeing more maps tests for sure. You got anything on that one Dori?
Dori: No, I don't. No questions.
Clint: Test 643: "Keyword Density versus Keyword Frequency. So this test is done by Joe Priest. He gets really technical in his stuff and basically at the end of the day, what he's doing is your keyword density is typically a percentage of the keyword frequency is typically count. So they're both at the end of the day talking about how much you use your keyword in a piece of content but keyword frequency, they're not necessarily mean a higher density versus a higher density doesn't mean you use your keyword more, you know what I mean? So it just depends on word count. So you see the entire setup here is just set that out. And then results of the test right there. The length he says, isn't a factor, the test pages filled out due to control pages. So the pure word count, in the case of his test is not a ranking factor. And you can see the densities that he is using etc. here to kind of fire things off. Dori, maybe you have some thoughts on this. If you are testing count and density, do you want to keep, because of how important density is. Do you want to try to get the count pages to meet the density number? So if you're going after 5%, and you want to do 10 words at 5% density, how would you go about setting up a test page in order to meet that? And I'm thinking that you'd have to actually go ahead and reduce the total word count to get the density right while keeping the frequency right.
Dori: That's a little mind Twister. I think I would have to think about that. But I don't know if you'd have to bring the word count down, if you were saying. Well, as long as it had the same number of words in each test. Like there's 1000 words. So the density could be 5% but there still a 1000 words.
Clint: Yeah
Dori: It's probably how I would set it up.
Clint: I would think though, if you're doing that, you'd have a hard time testing word, keyword count or frequency because let's say you're testing 5 versus 10. The word count. Yeah, that's a good one. This is a tough test. I'm glad Joe tackled it.
Dori: So we're testing keyword frequency or?
Clint: Versus
Dori: The length of an article?
Clint: Can a Page with Lower Frequency but Higher Density Outrank a Higher Frequency but Lower Density Page?
Dori: He is so smart. Because even his title is a kind of like a mind twister. Keyword density versus keyword frequency. What's the difference?
Clint: As I said, density is the it's not necessarily the count. But let's say you have 10 keywords in 1000 word article, so your density would be that percentage. What percentage of your content was covered in that keyword?
Dori: 10 of 10th
Clint: Yeah. Versus the frequency, let's say I use 5 keywords in an article, but the article used less words, 500. My density would still be 10%. But my count is lower. My count is only 5. So it's kind of, it's almost a, is long form content. Can you win with long form content or short form content in a long form search result by maintaining the same keyword density that a long form piece has.
Dori: Okay, and what was the answer?
Clint: Let's see.
Dori: What are we supposed to do?
Clint: Yeah, let's see. 10 tests were set up, 7 pages had a word count of 2000 and the density of 3%. That was his control pages, the C's. 3 pages had a word count of 4000 with a density of 1.5%. Those are the tests, the T's and 3 pages had a word count of 1000 and a density of 6%, the S's. So looking at this.
Dori: It looks like the T's are lost.
Clint: Yeah, the short form content with a higher density actually beat out long form content with a lower density. But neither of them significantly beat the control page of 3%.
Dori: Right. It's kind of like minestrone soup.
Clint: Yeah. I think he sends me these charts on purpose to make it as complicated as possible.
Dori: I know. It works. I mean, it does. It is. I'm off and confused with Joe's test, but I just feel like his IQ is probably 50 points higher than mine.
Clint: I don't know that he's tested whether I mean, it could be. To me, this is almost the keyword density test, because these are bouncing back and forth as much as with each other. Right? And they are the higher density 6% versus 3%. So I don't know he did or explain frequency enough in here to make that. I mean, because he has a higher density. And he figured he had to use it more right? But I think this is more of a keyword density test than it is a frequency test. And I think because of how these look, to me, it just saying that, you can win with 3000 words at 2%. And write out your content and explain it a little bit better. Or you can use short form content, just check the density up higher and still win.
Dori: Which would be more ideal, I mean, obviously. So a 6% of 1000 is 6, right?
Clint: You're asking me to do math and that's Kimberly's job.
Dori: Anybody? Do I have to get my computer out? I don't even know if I can. 60? Come on, somebody on there needs to know how to do this.
Clint: Muhamad's in there. He's a math genius.
Dori: 0.06, I would think is 60. Okay. So 60, you'd have to have 60 keywords in that 1000 word article versus like a frequency would be. Wouldn't it be like, say you have 10. 6 keywords total in 1000 word article?
Clint: Yeah.
Dori: So it does appear to be more of a keyword density test instead of a frequency test. But you know, Joe could probably explain it. It might make total sense. Although it might still go to my head. I don't know.
Clint: I think this would probably have worked better if the keyword density on all the pages matched. They didn't care about the word count. But he's more concerned about density. So I would argue 2000 and 3%, 3% is the keyword density that he wanted to go after. That's what I think. All of his pages Should have a 3% density and that he should have manipulated the word count in order to get to that 3% density while monitoring the keyword usage in terms of frequency.
Dori: Wait a second here. I just did 2000 x 0.03 is 60. So I bet 4000.
Clint: I think you want to divide? I'm not sure.
Dori: Well, you got to do times. It should be a single variable test. There are too many variables he is testing for simultaneously. I agree, Viktoria.
Clint: So 6. What is 6% of 100?
Dori: I was wrong
Clint: You're right at first and then you got your calculator.
Dori: I times it by 0.06 and not just 0.6. That's kind of good at math. Not on the spot. I'm never good anything on the spot.
Clint: To me, this is a keyword density issue. He's got 1.5 on these pages. 1.5 keywords on here, which essentially is 1, and then he's got 6 on these. And then he's got 3 on these. So he tested keyword density. All right. To me, if you wanted to know if keyword frequency was doing it, he needed to go for 3% on all 3 of these pages, and then manipulate the word count so that he got to that 3%. And that would've done frequency.
Dori: I agree. God, you're making me think.
Clint: That's every time I read one of Joe's tests, I gotta try to figure out the good here. We need to just get Joe to start presenting some tests.
Dori: Yes, send a video or audio and he can explain them. We can we can just play it.
Clint: You were all smart. Did we miss something? Let's see what the rest of this is. So simply adding more words to a page without consideration to keyword density would likely harm correct. Rather than help that keyword.
Dori: Wait, I mean the 1,000 at 6% do well. The S's? There's a couple of S's did.
Clint: Because it's a keyword density thing. So the keyword density is 3 and 6. And it's bouncing between Google's bouncing picking between one or the other, which is kind of consistent with what we see with keyword density tests anyway.
Dori: Yeah. And so the 1.5 keyword density didn't do well at all.
Clint: You would expect that to disappear. To go away. To drop.
Dori: Yeah. So that's kind of a cool thing, 3 to 5% is a sweet spot?
Clint: I mean, yeah, if you're playing with a keyword density game, then you know, higher is kind of better, if all other things being equal, and we've got so many keyword density tests. I mean at some point that's kind of where it goes.
Dori: Yeah. And Viktoria said 6% of 100 is 6. So 6% of 1000 is 60. That's what I thought. I did do it right. My calculator was right. 1000 and gotta go times 0.06 equals 60
Clint: Gotta ask Google the right questions. They give you the wrong answer. See, this is why we have Viktoria.
Dori: I know. I don't care what Google's says.
Clint: All right. So that's that this keyword frequency, I think this is kind of consistent with what we're seeing, you can use higher keyword frequency and go up 6%. And still did it. I mean, most people would look at 6% and get all your writing crap. But at the end of the day, Google still rewarding it. 3% seems pretty consistent as well, too. So I mean, if you want to write for 3 to 6%, and then see where you land, just hit that target. Just don't do 1.5% If you're competing with other people.
Dori: Right. John says the next test would be to keep the frequency constant and change the density.
Clint: Yeah, he's got a right here.
Dori: He probably meant Joe.
Clint: I think that's going to be kind of if he's changing the density, I think he kind of did the same thing here. I think he's gonna end up seeing similar results. He needs to redo this one to get any value out of this one, I would think.
Clint: This was for me. It's a Service Area Schema. We've did some other tests. What was it August that we did those other tests? I published those. We're going back to looking at if sections of the schema are being used specifically for rankings, ie "If I have something in schema that is not on page will it rank for Google for that something that I have in schema" here's the example code that I wrote. And then the areas where you can populate text, this is huge. That's typically where you can manipulate this stuff inside of any advanced schema that you're writing. You can see here showing the tests that was passed, and it's got no issues. And then I broke down just so and look, I get the page index for the primary term with the page was there. So if you're in the indexing, for a keyword or ranking for a keyword equals indexing, and your pages are indexed, if it's not ranking for the keyword, well, you know, I disagree. Okay. So anyway, all of those areas that I tested, none of them are ranking zones. I cannot put content in any of these zones, and then have it ranked for that page, if it's not in the content, which is kind of in line with what Googlers are saying about, you know, schema. Don't put anything in your schema, it's not in your page. You can do it still, it's just not going to rank for that thing that you put in there. So this is all really about helping the bot, show what Google is to expect on that page, and how to analyze it. And I go over that in my Rockstars presentation that's coming up. Even more, and kind of map that out for you..
Dori: That's a good thing to put to bed. So I bet there's arguments in the forums about that. So now, you know.
Clint: I think the biggest complaint against advance schema, the way that I teach people to write it, is that all your keyword stuffing, well, you're not keyword stuffing if Google's not using those for ranking purposes. You can't be keyword stuffing. Google's not using it that way. So how can you be breaking a rule that is not being accessible by anyone. I mean, if Google's not using these sections, for ranking purposes, then I'm not keyword stuffing.
Dori: Right
Clint: Okay. This is a website one. This is the other one that wouldn't end. It took forever to finally get it indexed. And here we go. None of those areas are ranking zone. So Google's not rewarding me for adding as much stuff in there as I want to. So then I can now as an SEO focus on writing better schema to tell the machine learning and AI, what that page is about, versus worried about autonomy stuff, some more keywords in here, and maybe I'll rank for them for the specific keywords. Which is good. So I think we've kind of put that argument to bed. Any questions on that from the crowd? I know they're fast, but we have those tests from August too. It's kind of at this point, you're getting a little bit redundant if I broke down a bit more and more.
Dori: No questions. I just think it's nice to know that we can, you know, rest that subject.
Clint: Yeah, put that argument down.
Clint: Let's see. This one is from James. Glad to see him back. "Is testing Social Shares, to see if they improve Rankings". And this is something, I think SIA has tested this quite a bit. There's a lot of to this day still arguments about it, or you know, if Social sharing does help, Social sharing doesn't help, etc. And I really at the end of the day, in my opinion, it kind of boils down to the sites that you're using, right? But James did this test, set it all up. Here's the actual links that were created. This is primarily Twitter, which is I would argue, is one of the most commonly Social sites, there's some Pinterest in there, Love me some Pinterest and LinkedIn also a great socials, great site. So there's not Social stares from software for example or legit really good, good websites. The results he started this on my birthday, 7th of September. And keep scrolling down here. You can see the highlights just kind of went down a little bit. In this pace, stayed in position 8. So where did it start? Right in the middle, so 5, and then went down to 8. That kind of honestly doesn't really surprise me. I see this a lot because the social shares URL's. One are not indexed or there's no power to them. So it's essentially like creating a brand new PBN link and not having any links to the page where your link is that if they're not landing on the homepage of the PBN where all the links are and then going just on your brand new page, your PBN or your guest post that doesn't have any backlinks whatsoever.Zero plus zero equals zero, and you're going to get zero results out of it. And that's pretty much what we see here. I've seen some other stacks where you have the Pinterest that link sees it, it goes to the link to from the Twitter and then the Twitter is link to from a whole bunch of other Twitter's and all that kind of stuff. And those things do work as you build those out, because you're building links to the backlinks. So seeing in this presentation, I mean, you can argue that social shares don't work, because they're brand new links, and they need some love in order to fire that off. So that would be a good progression for James in this test is to go ahead and hit all these backlinks that he's created here with backlinks themselves and see if that pushes it up. And my inclination is that, especially if you send those links to Pinterest, this is my favorite tier 1 target these days. Any questions on that Dori?
Dori: No questions. Your favorite target is a Pinterest page.
Clint: Yeah, tier 1, they're easy. You can get good traffic out of there if you hit the right markets, and you can also get some of these backlinks. And you can backlink to the Pinterest fairly safely with any tool and be okay.
Dori: Yeah, kind of like YouTube. With the link out in the description. That was a winner for a long time. I wonder if it's still working these days. In any case, I want to say Happy Birthday and you're a Virgo. Wow, I'm a Virgo too.
Clint: Yeah, that's why we get along so well.
Dori: Yeah. He always punches me in Slack. Then if I'm lucky, I'll get a hug GIF.
Clint: Let's see. Here's some further ideas that James going with increased number of shares, user interaction, CTR may help click through, that's a good one. And then maybe the validation idea is actually a really good too. I like this one here where you're intermixing your social shares and maybe even sharing. Like if you do a PBN or a guest post somewhere and you say, you know, James Goldsmith talks about On page optimization on his website here or Site X announces James Goldsmith's contents about On page optimization and linking to both the PBN and the target page and the same share especially on like Twitter. I always wondered if that would work. I think the downside of that is if you actually get a popular Twitter account, then you're giving away your network. So that might cause you some issues, but you can certainly do that with press releases. And I do that all time with magic PR. Even more so these days.
Dori: We're gonna hear a lot about press releases. It's gonna be like the press release fight at SEO Rockstars. I got Nash, but he's going after Randy Rohde. And then there's Holly, and she's gonna tell us how to do them correctly. Because, you know, she got sued this summer, she was in the news like Blackhat you know, a marketer doing this that the other thing, it's all settled now, but it was pretty darn scary for her.
Clint: And hers was syndication thing, it was how she was doing.
Dori: So different ways of Press Releasing type of stuff, but it'll be interesting. And James, I hear that you're making it to to Vegas live. Is that correct? Yeah, he said Yes, that's awesome. Because, you know, there was travel restrictions and I don't watch the news. So I didn't know that they were lifted yet but I read that he was coming.
Clint: Oh, hopefully the Robert Irvine Restaurant and Tropicana still open. I'm going to be hitting up the tequila there every night if they are so.
Dori: Yep, but just bring your mask. Las Vegas is a mandated mask place.
Clint: Yep. Not too bad though when I was there it was it was. There's no one chasing you down and stuff where your mask.
Clint: Alright, let's see here's another one from James, "Do Forum links still work?". And this is a great one. I think the Reddit thread. James, if I'm not correct, this is a little bit older. But it still applies, and people are still referencing it quite a bit. Here's some of the forums that he used. They're not bad forums, they all have decent metrics. In regards to domain authority out of Moz. I mean, this one was a little low, but I don't know the actual form itself. But most of them are consistently pretty high. And they are all putting into this test page here, number 5 and his selection when he started off, as we roll this out, still number 5, then it dropped to the last place, then went back to 5, 6 and then 2, which is awesome. So Forum links clearly are still winning the day here. I kind of would have expected that to be number 1, since the control pages didn't have any backlinks that if there is significant enough power in the forum link, it would have shot it up to number 1 eventually. So maybe even just wait that out and see if it does it. Maybe the other forum links aren't necessarily indexed yet, you can check that out and see if they're all indexed. I'm not sure if you did that. But number 2, is still good. I mean, it's still at anything we still prove, you still prove that forum links are not being filtered, like everyone claims they are Google smart enough to pick up on them and not give you credit. Clearly, they're still giving you credit. So this is a good test, kind of get rid of some of the mythbusting.
Clint: And this test is from Shree. I believe this is his 2nd test. But still a good one. "Will embedding YouTube video on a Page improve rankings?" This is a constant thing, it's going around a lot. Improve your indexing by putting a video up there. Or you can get create easy relevance for your topic. If you put a video from Google and then you'll rank higher etc. And people have kind of, you know, taken that to heart and got video after video and stuff. And it might not necessarily be doing the work that you think it is. So we set up the test you can see, he's right up right here, he even kind of give you all the URLs. Here's the embed code that he used to drop it in. He's got it in here in the figure class. I think he's probably the class stuff is just part of his frame. But the key part here is the iframes loading stuff that you can see there. And then it was using Gutenberg to embed some stuff in it, there's some lazy loading, this is really good if you want to kind of slow things down. And then there's another script that you can get from embed responsibly that even makes everything a little bit more responsive, a free website. Schema code, when testers drop in the schema code as well, just to make sure everything's going and here's how they pages or ranking afterwards, kinda like to see it up and down. But the 2 pages that were ranking dropped out of the index as Gutenberg fell out. And then the other one, just kind of, you know, one is beating the other versus having the schema code but none of the videos, none of the pages with just the video on it, in any form, actually ranked higher over the control pages. So I think he kind of put this one to bed, maybe would have liked individual test of each one of the elements that he's doing versus stacking them up, but I understand why he did it. Just because indexing is kind of a pain right now. So in this way, but yeah, I wouldn't recommend just putting a video up just for the purposes of boosting the relevancy of the content. I would only do it if it's specifically helps aid the the content and push it along the understanding of it. Any questions on that Dori?
Dori: No, I've been typing to James asking if its okay since he's coming. If it's okay, that he speaks at 9am because because he's in Europe. So I just keep getting all good now, 9am is good. So I guess he will not be going out with you guys the night before.
Clint: Oh, he can settle that. He can't get back round, but we're gonna get though wild. That's how he described it. Alright, and another one from James he was busy. Oh, go ahead.
Dori: I was just gonna say. James, you know, don't take it personal when the room is only half full. Anne and I will be there.
Clint: This is a blogger test. If you don't remember, a couple months back, we tested and I published all those tests on Blogger after the December 2020 update. Did what we think or prove that it was devalued blogger and actually, in some cases, turned it into a great negative SEO thing. And I know we kind of surmise that that's what was gonna happen. And James wanted to prove it. And so he linked to Blogger link to a test page with bloggers at tier 1. Here's the blogger and then here's all the links that he sent to this blogger to, in an effort, push this page down. So it's already ranking number 1, want to send the blogger link to it, will it push it down. And it did significantly to the blogger. Boom! From Blogger and pushed it all the way down. So it was number 1 and now it's number 9. Which is pretty much consistent with what I expected to see. And now we've got third party testing to prove that that's exactly what had happened. So there's still tools out there to this day that are using Blogger as their primary tier 1. And people were sending these links to their websites and not knowing either A. Why is this not working? Or B. Why is my rank dropping? And that's why, because blogger is busted yo. Don't use it. I recommended to everyone to disavow blogger. I just disavow the subdomain. So subdomain.blogger.com versus dispelling the whole domain. Because they might bring it back one day I doubt it but they might and then it could be an opportunity. The hassle is now I think a lot of people have kind of especially in the the tester, Blackhat tester world, they've figured out that is bad and they're sending these links to people intentionally. And people are like, Oh, I got a bloggers and I don't know what's going on. And people other people are saying oh, don't worry about it. Google is ignoring them. Well, if they're ignoring them, that page when the drop like Iraq, so disavow them on a safe side and just keep an eye on them. Maybe eventually they'll bring it back. I kind of doubt that they will because it was spammed all too high heaven. Google had to do something at some point. So and they did it. The other ones that we got to test now are wordpress.com. Tumblr was brought up today. Medium people mentioned medium, but I think that site is so moderated that I doubt that Google would give medium the same treatment. And then there's a couple other blogger platforms like what is it Live Journal? that's another one that could be done. So I think that right now, if you are in reputation management and blogger would be your best friend because you can knock something down the number 9 and then boost a couple things up and push a bad thing off of the off of page 1, onto page 2. Pretty easily using a blogger thing. So I would try that out if you're doing reputation management stuff.
Dori: Yeah, James had just mentioned that being used for negative SEO. Perfect!
Clint: People con for sure. I can't be the only one that didn't realize what was going on with that. Alrighty, any other any questions on the previous test? I speak now or forever hold your peace because this next one this write up for this test is 43 pages long.
Dori: No way
Clint: Yeah
Dori: Whoah. You're gonna bend my head again. I can feel it, coming.
Clint: All right. So it's 43 pages long. I have some here and there just to bust it all out. If you spent any money optimizing for specifically for Core Web Vitals. If you collected money optimizing specifically for Core Web Vitals, you may be kicking yourself in the rear end at the end of this. If you listen to my advice, months ago when I told you not to be optimized for Core Web Vitals, you're going to be pretty glad that you listened to me because, finally proved it. Core Web Vitals is not used by Google as a ranking factor. Despite what Google said in their announcements, despite what every SEO journal, SEO newspaper, SEO blog, SEO talking head said, Google is not using Core Web Vitals for ranking determinations. There's only one part that falls into the Core Web Vitals scope. And it's not even something that's announced on the testing tools that correlates with rankings. And you'll kind of figure out why Google pinch Core Web Vitals so bad or so strongly, in order to get SEOs to jump on this gravy train. And then, when they pushed it all out, and we're done with it, at the end of August, nobody saw any significant improvement, unless they did one thing. So let's go through this, and show you how I got onto this track. This was an adventure. I started in the end of September. As you can see, those dates are not a lie. That's when I started this test. And then I finished it last night, we're writing this up, it took 2 and a half hours. Marie had the rest of the entire dossier printed and she was still waiting for me to finish this one. So I do currently and in the past offer a PageSpeed optimization service for WordPress. And I do that without any sort of "Oh, you shouldn't do that" Because if you increase the webpage significantly, if you increase the optimization of the say pages loading in 10 seconds, and you get it loading in 3, you will see a rankings boost because that is a significant difference. If you are optimizing a page that loads in 3 seconds and you wanted to get it and you get it loading it to. You're probably not going to see much of a difference. And to this day, I still turn away business for Core Web Vitals optimization and PageSpeed optimization in general. If your site's just not bad. If it's not, if it's good, if it's within that range, if it's still loading within 3 seconds, if I can get on there and as a user, I can still click around on a mobile phone and it's just fine. I tell you save your money, put it somewhere else. And that advices seem to work well for me. There are plenty of people who jumped on a gravy train, though and promoted Core Web Vitals as something to sell to optimize for. You can see here, Josh McAdams. He said he charged customers 1000s. There's 18 people here who voted yes. I charged for specific package. 52% say no. I would argue that, you know, based on the size of the group and the type of people that are in there that this number is probably a lot higher. I have no doubt that people were showing all those talking heads and showing all those articles. And they're charging customers a lot more for Core Web Vitals because A. It's a ranking factor. It's the latest and greatest thing. We need to be optimized for it. So you should spend me you know, anywhere from $250. I had one client do that too, and other clients who literally spent 1000s of dollars, top demise for this metric. Here in the group, you see 123 people think that is a vital or an important ranking factor and the 205 said NO. But I will say that I've seen people that voted NO who were talking about it in some context or another saying that you need to do it. So no, but it's user. The biggest argument was no, it's not a ranking factor, but user experiences. I bounced rate, pingback etc.
And if you've been a member of SIA for any period of time, you've by now had a chance to go through some of the tests. You see that we've tested those things bounce rate, time on site, etc. And none of those appears to be ranking factors. In all fairness, we probably need to change test those again. But based off of the data that I've got here, I don't know that it would be a valuable use of time or for us, because based off of the data that I've seen that I collected during this month, it's not likely that that's different. But in May 2020, Google announced Core Web Vitals and then in November of 2020, they said, Oh, it's going to be a ranking factor. And then it was on SEO is repentimisting this thing talking about it everyone was you can turn a page or go to a group or anything without someone asking about a Core Web Vitals optimization. And this number is not a lie. I do know some businesses that have spent well over that to optimize for Core Web Vitals to get these metrics in the green. Which is pretty sad. So June 15, Google announced that they're rolling this thing out, and they said, it's going to take till the end of August. I don't know about you guys, but I have not seen one update. In all the years that I've been doing this that took a month and a half to roll out. That just sounded shady to me right off the bat. And as I say, they call me Blackhat. Is that I mean, what is Google thinking? Do they honestly believe that we believe and a lot of people to this day still do believe? Oh, it's not rolled out completely yet. This isn't done. The only thing that I could say that maybe would cause that timeframe would be a shake up in the SERPs. And from July or from July all the way till now. There has been no significant shake up the shirts that you could track and Core Web Vitals. So Lee Witcher did an episode on SEO Fight Club on the 22nd. They did I got wrangled into doing this. And he put a whole bunch of data, got some keywords and analyzed it. And based off the data, he could find no correlation. Lee's smart dude, and his presentation made it seem like there was some funny math going on there. So I wanted to look at it from from a third party perspective. I want to dig dive deep into it. Kinda duplicate what he's doing. If I can duplicate it, then I can go to all the naysayers that poopoo Lee's research and say, Look, I did it again. And he's right. On top of that, not too long after Ted Kubaitis actually found this script. And it's on this page here. When you get the dossier, you can click on that link, it'll take you to a website that Google set up. It's like 5 pages teaching you to install the script. And this script sends us data CLS FID LCP to you Google Analytics account, and then it collects that data for you inside your Google Analytics account, which is pretty simple, where it goes, and you can see that firing off and working inside of the Chrome Inspect tool. And what you'll see are these numbers right here. Once you look very very closely at these numbers, as you're doing this, just kind of looking. See if you see something that Ted and I saw. Wait for it. I'll give you a little bit of a hint.
Random match. Look at these LCP variances, FID, all these variances. CLS kind of consistent, but it's still a big jump there, maybe you can kind of have to read out the caching maybe. But look at these variances, LCP, these are all the same webpage, the same webpage, the same browser, the same computer, the same internet service provider, the same IP. And if you're hitting the same page over and over again, like I told you, all you have to do is you open a page, you click anywhere these to fire off, and then you push, reset, refresh, and then the CLS cups. And those numbers will go over and over again. As long as you keep doing that. It's the same person, the same web browser and etc. You would expect all those numbers to be closer. I mean, you get some latency and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, closer, and these are pretty far off when you're talking about milliseconds. So it's all random. And this was Ted asked, as well, I asked one of the blue that was gone on here. So I looked at that script, broke it down a little bit more. You see here, it's referenced inside of the scripts, this JavaScript right here. I highligh so you can see it. I open that up. And what we found was their JavaScript was a math is a random number generator. So I was going through and creating all these things and saying is your LCP, this is your time to first buy the FID etc. And it's using funny math to do it. On top of that, you notice in my original example, there was only 3 metrics that are getting sent to Google. But Google is actually tracking 5, and getting used to send these with a script all into there. So I thought I was kind of shady, if they're going to collect 5 things, and they want you to install this, to give you some more information than they could at least written the code so that you get to see all 5 in your analytics in your log file. So I rewrote the script and put it all right there for you. You can drop this on your homepage, and then go to that Google site, it'll tell you how to connect to analytics and how to see this for yourself inside of on your website, or you can just go to digitaleer.com. That's my website and do the log thing. And you can see all that stuff as well. Just make sure again, you have to follow those directions in there so you know how to read the log and get that the fire off. Here are the test pages I created. I did some different things to them to just kind of mess with those numbers to see if we see some consistency, and or not. And you can see the changes in here. And these are the URLs. I will be publishing this test publicly to kind of promote SIA, as well. So these domains, as you are probably familiar, you've seen these domains in other tests. I killed them, all the other tests are all deleted, these pages are set to no index nofollow. And I fully expect to get a manual penalty sooner rather than later when all the narc SEOs go right into Google, like they did to Kyle. So that's why I killed those, I'll delete these in and get some of the test domains. After this is all published. Kill and dropped those domains. But every one of them, every one of these things that had that script on him, I think Ted removed off of his by now. But every one of them came back with random numbers. On top of that, when Ted removed that script, that little 5-6 line script, his Core Web Vitals scores went up 30%. So that one little script that they want you to put on your website will actually drop your Core Web Vital scores by 30%. That is just redonkulous, in my opinion. And Ted's site is so sensitive to that, because it's pure HTML. So it's not a WordPress, and he's kind of CMS, HTML, hard coded that website. And that's why it was significant. So imagine if you put that on a WordPress or something like that, you'd really think with your numbers. And a lot of these tools are running off of the same thing. So when I say a lot of these tools page, what's it Pingdom GT metrics webpagetest.org. They're all running off the same API. And you can still see the random variants inside of these, the numbers that they're getting.
And what's really really interesting is they're all running on the PageSpeed API. And the PageSpeed API is a average of the last 28 days of Googlebot went to your website. It's not even real time. So you go into these testings tools, you're not even getting the real time data from Core Web Vitals, you're getting the last 28 days, the average of the last 28 days and the metrics. And then there's the Chrome user experience, which has been, which I mentioned, people were saying that user experience is what the real factor is and it's a consolidation. And that creates Core Web Vitals, well, that's updated monthly. And that's what's given to these tools from the PageSpeed API. So I mean, at this point, we know it's a random number generator, we know the API is based off old data. So how can random numbers be a legitimate ranking experience? And how can random numbers be a legitimate ranking or user experience thing, which is the CrUX data. Here is a list of all the API data that you get in the API. All of these things, report something in the API. You can pull this out using Screaming Frog, just drop your keyword in there, turn on the PageSpeed indexer API, and it'll go to town and pull all that stuff for you. I did that for all of these keywords. I downloaded the top 100 URLs that are ranking for it, I used a tool called hexomatic to do that it was stupid easy. And then I put those all in the to the list function in Screaming Frog, which imported the URLs and then got all the API data. And then you have to use the main export button, there's two export buttons, one under the PageSpeed tab, and one under the main one, it's on top of the software. And it'll pull it spit it back out in the order that you put it in, in our case, ranking position 1 to 100. So it spit it right back out. And then I use Ted's correlate editing tool to drop everything. I was in spreadsheet hell. It's 100 spreadsheets here, and then another 100 spreadsheet here. And then like 10 spreadsheets to put everything back together. So I hope you appreciate the depth of which I had to go through to find out or prove was a factor or not. So in the write up, you're going to see that I broke down these measurements. And then I actually provided a definition, if there was a definition to be had for them. Some of these do not, you just couldn't find them. Some of them were had definitions by Google, others had just kind of educated guesses. And then others, there was nothing. So we kind of just use common sense, rest of them. But as I pulled all this stuff, the tools are all running off of this random math API. And we can see here, performance score, it's not a factor. When you're looking at these charts, right. So the the first image is a specific keyword that I just looked at one keyword, for example, for performance score. And then the second one is where I looked at all 100 or 10 keywords, the top 10 of those to see if there's a ranking. I could have gotten all 100. But then these charts would be totally unreadable. And it wouldn't change what we're seeing here, because I picked them all randomly, just kind of open the file and boom, got 10. And you see this keyword, top 10, kind of sorta, but the correlations are nowhere clear to be seen significant. We want these bars to turn green. At the end of the day, we want these lines to go straight. Those two other things happen and we know we have a ranking factor and performance score was not it. So that one's down. First Contentful paint time, FCP, not a factor, not even close, not anywhere in any keyword, it was even close to being a factor. Speed Index time, how quickly the content is visually displayed during the page load. Seems important. Users want that fast, right? Not a factor. Largers Contentful Paint, measures the time a website takes the show to the user, not a factor. Not even close. Not on any of the keywords. Time to interactive, how long it takes to the page become fully interactive? Its interactive when its page is shown. There's event handlers and user interactions, like you move your mouse on that page and stuff. Those kinds of fire out those events not a factor.
Total Blocking time. Remember, we remove blocking scripts, eliminate blocking scripts, defer your JavaScript all those recommendations. Yeah, not affect. Cumulative layout shift, not affect. Total requests, reduces the number of HTML requests on your page. You have too many. And this is something that I fixed to this day, right. So to just go to some web pages, and they're trying to load 300 things. I always reduce this. Still not a factor. Total bite size, your entire website, all your stuff. HTML, CSS JavaScript, not a factor when combined. Weird. Remember this, remember this size, but this one here when you combine it all. Not a factor. Image Size, this is a combination of all your images added up. So if you have 10 images, and they're all 13 gigabytes each, Google did not care, not a factor. Image count, 1 image or 1000 images, doesn't matter. I mean the high right here, the low is in the teens and the highs are well into the 80s. I think that number is closer to 90, not a factor. CSS Count, count doesn't. But look at what size is doing. Kind of correlating, getting a little closer to a straight line. We got this weird outlier here in here. But it's kind of correlating. So remember, I told you remember, size, a keyword, JavaScript count? Not so much. Size, a little bit. Not too much, though. Some words, Yes. Some words, No. Font size, they don't care. You load 1 font or 500 fonts, they don't care. Media size, put all the videos, audios all that stuff, Google doesn't care. Other stuff, this is just anything that they didn't factor into the other things right. So I don't know, maybe you've got some weird PHP thing going on or something like that, they they lump that into other, doesn't matter.
Third party stuff, this kind of matters a little bit. They're saying don't go crazy loading all those scripts, if you're in love with your chat, and you're embedding 100 maps and doing 50 videos and all that, you might have gone a little nuts, for the top 10. When you get into the top 100, not so much. And then this is the count, on average of all the keywords. So 3rd party count, not really a factor. I mean, in this case, because we're looking at top 10, maybe you should keep an eye on that. If you're in number 10 and you want to be number 1, look at your 3rd party stuff. But at the end of the day, if you're competing and you're below 10, then it's one of those things you don't need to worry about. And that's consistent across the board when you're looking at the top 10. So top 10 of 10 keywords you see it's not a factor. 3rd party size, not a factor. Google is not penalizing you for pulling API's. I used to tell people, hey, you need to reduce that because it's going to hurt you. The correlation say it's actually not. This one is funny, the core web vitals assessment is literally you either pass or you fail. That is the measurement that's returned in the API. Pass Core Web Vitals, or failed Core Web Vitals, I'll tell you, only about a third of the top 100 on all the 76 keywords that I pulled, even have a pass or fail score. 90% of the URLs that are in the top 10 for all 76 of those keywords fail. So failing the test in the Core Web Vitals assessment is not a ranking factor. I mean, you could fail. I mean, at this point, like Ted suggested, you might just want to fail to get over it. Because you see more sites, you know, they don't pass, here's pass. Fail is this medium line right here, you see all these sites that are failing. And then these are all the sites that didn't have any test scores. And look, they're failing predominantly. And so that's what I said the Core Web Vitals, you get the humor and stuff if you actually read this yourself. I had the humor so you weren't going to read 43 pages. But enter the content of CrUX, the user experience. Everyone's pouting off and pouting that saying that user experience is there. Google's measurement of user experiences FCC, FCP, LCP, FID time, TIP, total blocking time the kuna layout shift, we already looked at those numbers, but Google reports them separately out of the cracks report, the CrUX report is updated once a month. And you can see here, first Contentful paint, not a ranking factor. Give me the layout shifts kind of correlated a little bit. So this one you might want to be careful with. But at the end of the day, when you push all those other ones out, and you look at the different keywords across the board, not a factor. So in this keyword, yeah, you might want to worry about it. But for in general, No, you don't have to worry about Layout shift. First Contentful type type not even close to being a factor, largest content type not even close. So Chrome user experience is not a factor, user experience. in general is not a factor because these are, this is how they're measuring it. They tell us right there. This is how they're measuring it. Their API is telling us how they're measuring it. And they're not using it. They're not using it as a ranking factor.
But wait, there's more. "Size", remember, I told you to worry about size. Look at this, the HTML size is correlating with higher rankings, in particular in the top 5 of these keywords, right. So if you want to get into the top 5, you need to look at how your website's built, how can you code this, and how big the HTML size is. When you add up, the slight correlation with JavaScript or and CSS size, we're actually on to something. We're actually on what? Google was using for ranking factor when talking about Core Web Vitals, it was at the Core Web Vitals scores. It was size. We see here HTML size of the ranking position. There's just one outlier right here. It's high but all of the sites in there are high. So in this case, we can see that size does matter. You want to have a smaller website, what they're trying to do is get you to actually use this as a tiebreaker. So all those people will say, Oh, Core Web Vitals was a tiebreaker or out of something. But it's not Core Web Vitals is tiebreaker. It's your HTML size that's the tiebreaker. So if you're in the top 10, and your timesharing is Ted calls it, switching between 2 web, your URL and someone else's your URL, and it keeps going over, go reduce your HTML size a little bit. And you might lock yourself in to that position that your timesharing for. So why Core Web Vitals? Why Lighthouse, CrUX and all that, at the end of the day, Google wanted you to fix size, your HTML size. And all those eliminate render blocking scripts, you know, defer your loading, using async and or defer and the JavaScript and your CSS, all of that was about reducing your HTML size. So if you reduce your HTML size, Googlebot can crawl your website faster, cost Google less money ergo. Now we have Core Web Vitals and this bill campaign to get you to fix all these things. When I could have just said it was reduced the HTML size, make your site's cleaner. But most people would never get to the answer of what do I have to clean. So they provided all these tools for us to give us a whole bunch of things to clean in order for us to reduce the HTML size on our websites. And that is the actual ranking factor inside of for PageSpeed optimization. The HTML size of your websites. And that is a month and a half my life that I get back now, or I'm never gonna get to figure that out. But I'm glad I did.
Dori: Wow. I mean, I just incredibly impressed for one thing that you spent a month and a half, and I can empathize with the pain of the spreadsheets and everything. But oh my god, the data that you just found. I mean, this is incredible. Not a factor, not a factor, not a factor. Holy crap. I mean, is this what you're presenting it SEO Rockstars?
Clint: I'm actually I was gonna do schema, but I'm thinking about this one.
Dori: Well, you can do both. I mean, you know, if you do this at SEO Rockstars then let's publish it afterwards. Let's clean up the report and publish it as a white paper, or maybe a shorter article on the site that points to the white paper that people can go read all the data, but oh my god, you know, people are gonna freak out.
Clint: Yeah, for sure. I think this will be a game changer as long as we can get it and get it out there and get in front of people. We do have a year and a half of marketing to kind of undo all these people. The people who are trained to do Core Web Vitals, they all spent a lot of money and now here we are coming along saying hey, you just. I don't necessarily say they wasted their money. However they were chasing the wrong metric. And I said it in here is everyone that I've talked to you right here, everyone that I talked to you about Core Web Vitals and they say that they got improvements. When you delve down into the conversation more, what did you do? It always turns out to be, we cleaned up our code, we remove things that we didn't need and our site got faster and our Core Web Vitals went up. So ergo, they reduce the size of their HTML, JavaScript and CSS. And now we just know what Google was after, what they're looking for.
Dori: Wow, it's amazing. And I think it'd be a lot of people are gonna freak out thinking how much money they spent doing some of the stuff and maybe they didn't reduce the size of their HTML, and they still don't really know what's going on why they're not ranking.
Clint: Or those that have good Core Web Vitals scores now, but their sites are still slow.
Dori: Would this pertain to WordPress? When you're talking about HTML, WordPress is extremely heavy in code. So I mean, we've done test, HTML versus WordPress and HTML sites do rank better, In general, but would you advise a client to switch over from WordPress to HTML?
Clint: No, but I would advise them to have their theme reviewed. And if their theme is full of blow, like if, for example, Elementor was really bad at it. They got better, but they were really bad at putting a lot of code in there and loading, like you had one feature you're using on one page, and that script will load across the entire website. What's a good example, contact. Was that contact form, contact us I think is called or whatever. It's like the one that loads on every page, whether you got a form on there or not. Gravity Forms does a little bit too. For example, you know, looking at those things and saying what is loading on this page that is not being used, but it's still being loaded. And that's dirty code. And page builders and themes are really bad at that. It's been my experience of WordPress on its own is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, they're doing some work to reduce the code inside of the WordPress core. But at the end of the day, I don't think that that is going to have all that much difference for website owners. I think people theme developers are the ones that are really going to need to step up their games. I mean, we all want these fancy shiny things, and fancy shiny things require code, sometimes they require a lot of kid. So we need our devs to not think solely on let's get this built, they need to think more, how do I get this built with the least amount of code possible. And that's where the game is gonna win.
Dori: Do you know of a place where people can test themes for? this kind of thing?
Clint: Well, because we know that its a random number generator now. I mean, you can kind of compare a little bit using the testing tools. But at the end of the day, it's really you're just going to have to actually look at, I don't know, maybe even putting a bunch of themes up on some domains and then running a tool like Cora or something like that. That's actually going to count the size of your HTML files for you.
Dori: Yeah, that would be interesting.
Clint: And what are you really looking for at the end of the day is something like this SEO, something that's going to tell you this, the size of this slide. This is all the stuff that's in the DOM. This is all the HTML file is loading for this particular website. You can see even on SEOIntel, the theme is got a lot crap, right? So all this CSS and all this stuff, it's all populating and it's all creating stuff. So what is the actual bite size of that? That's being out so you need tools in the market, they'll give us that and that'll probably help us out significantly. If you want to chase the HTML size rabbit. I wouldn't get into that, unless of course you're stuck in the top 5 position you want to rank out, you've done everything and you're looking for something to kind of break the tie, HTML size might be the way to go now.
Dori: Yeah, well there's a lot of people out there in that position, I think.
Clint: Yeah, for sure.
Dori: Or looking to get into the top 3 instead of 5 and below, above the fold. And this would be a definitely an above the fold type of move.
Clint: Especially if you've done everything else. I mean, there's always something else you can do. But if you've done everything else, and you got a dev who's got some time in their hands, point him in this direction, tell him to clean up the code.
Dori: Wow Clint, that was awesome!
Clint: I did my little clappy function, but I don't think it works in here.
Dori: I don't think it works in GoToWebinar unfortunately, I think it's just a YouTube thing.
Dori: Well there's my claps.
Clint: Cool
Dori: Okay, we're over the hour. I don't think we have any questions on that. So you guys were the first to find out. The first to know.
Clint: Well, I gave this to IMG as well, because, you know, Ted and Lee inspired this, but they got this today, too. So all you guys know, today, I think there's just about as many people in there so now there's 10 SEOs that know the truth.
Dori: Are they gonna publish it as well?
Clint: They have a PDF. They have this branded SIA PDF but they don't actually have the like, it's not posted. You know what I mean?
Dori: Okay.
Clint: Like I said I wanted to do this publicly, push this out and kind of drive, uses data to promote Digitaleer, SIA and markets with this stuff.
Dori: I'll publish it to the list and say, Whoa, we just broke, you know, huge myths on this stuff and got down to the core of the Core Web Vitals.
Clint: Yeah, for sure. Hopefully, I didn't oversell it. I know, I was talking to a lot of smack in the Skype group and stuff about, hey come up with some new data and stuff. I mean, obviously, everyone knew my position that Core Web Vitals, I didn't think they should be optimizing for Core Web Vitals. So it wasn't an entire secret was coming. But I think, using all this data that kind of definitively put this to bed. And it did allow me to pinpoint the actual ranking factor inside of here that Google.
Dori: Okay, awesome. I really enjoyed that, actually. So any questions on that? None is coming in.
Clint: Yeah, well, it is a lot. So I'll say go back, read the PDF. I did throw a lot of humor in there. So that it makes it more easier to digest. Again, some of the descriptions and stuff are in there to kind of help you filter that stuff out and understand exactly what they're talking about. But the too long didn't read version is reduced HTML size.
Dori: And the work that you put into that is just overwhelming. Wow, I mean, it's incredible.
Clint: Yeah, it was quite the rabbit hole. I'm not gonna lie.
Dori: I hope you had a little bit of fun.
Clint: Yeah.
Dori: Okay, Good! Okay, everybody, it's 3:20. We're gonna close it up for today. And if you have any questions, you know where to find Clint. Either in the Skype group or Slack. Okay, everybody we will see some of you in SEO Rockstars and the rest of you online or back here next month. I'm signing out. Sign out, Clint.
Clint: All right. Bye! Again, like she's said find me in the groups. If you want to talk more about this if you want to see the data, let me know we can publish all the spreadsheets and stuff. You can go at this yourself and see if you come up with the same conclusions that I did. So talk to you later.
Dori: Okay, bye, everybody.