Counterintuitive website positioning Suggestions That Would possibly Work

A couple of months ago Aleyda Solis posted a thread on Twitter (I’ve been waiting for a slow week to post it here) asking, “What is the most contradicting SEO recommendation / implementation you’ve made, that in the context that you worked in actually made sense? and paid off as expected? “

The thread is easy to read and includes these counter-intuitive SEO recommendations and implementations:

• Very little content on ecommerce category pages.
• Removed a footer link pointing back to the homepage on over 100 million pages with the same target anchor text.
• Leave thousands of meta descriptions blank to prioritize time elsewhere (important technical fixes).
• The agency recommended summarizing similar articles into a single article … it turned out that traffic was rocketing for all of the keywords they were previously ranked for …
• Increased page speed by adding larger images + removed content depth = big ranking boost.
• Pretty generic stock photos have been added to articles. Articles slowed down. Web traffic (excluding image traffic) increased in 90% of the sample.
• If you remove hreflang tags, Google will be more likely to figure out which country / language urls to display.
• I recommended deleting news articles from about 5 years ago and all pages on level 4 of the site. Worked

And there is so much more – these are fun and worth reading. So click through to the Twitter post to browse all of the responses. I’ve only posted a few of these above.

…

I’ll cover in the next article how all or most of SEO “depends” on context and why we shouldn’t blindly rule of thumbs (what to do when working with team members who have had some SEO exposure)

– Aleyda Solis (@aleyda) November 2, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.