A couple of months ago, Aleyda Solis posted a thread on Twitter (I was waiting for a slow week to post it here) asking "what's the most counterintuitive SEO recommendation/implementation you've done that actually made sense in the context you were working and paid off as you expected?"
The thread is a good read and include these counterintuitive SEO recommendations and implementations:
- Very little content on e-commerce category pages.
- Removed a footer link that was pointing back to the home page with same target anchor text on over 100M pages.
- Left 1000s of meta descriptions blank to prioritize time elsewhere (important tech fixes).
- Agency recommended the consolidation of similar articles into a single article... Turns out traffic fell through the floor for all the keywords they previously ranked for...
- Increased page speed by adding larger images + removed depth of content = big ranking boost.
- Added fairly generic stock photos to articles. Articles got slower. Web traffic (exclusive of image traffic) increased in 90% of the sample.
- Remove hreflang tags and Google is more likely to figure out which country/lang URLs to show.
- I advised to delete around 5 years of news articles and all pages on level 4 of the site. Worked
And there is so much more - these are fun and worthy of a read, so click through to the Twitter post to scan through all the responses, I only posted some of them above.
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— Aleyda Solis 👩🏻💻 (@aleyda) November 2, 2021
I will feature in upcoming piece to going through how all or most in SEO "depends" on the context, and why we shouldn't rules of thumbs blindly as a consequence (which ends up being a common challenge when working with team members who have had some SEO exposure)
Forum discussion at Twitter.
