Counterintuitive SEO Recommendations That Might Work

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.

…

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)

— Aleyda Solis 👩🏻‍💻 (@aleyda) November 2, 2021

Forum discussion at Twitter.