When Craig Bradford[1] of Distilled reached out and asked if we'd like to run some SEO experiments on Moz using DistilledODN, our reply was an immediate "Yes please!"
If you're not familiar with DistilledODN[2], it's a sophisticated platform that allows you to do a number of cool things in the SEO space:
- Make almost any change to your website through the ODN dashboard. Since the ODN is a cloud platform that sits in front of your website (like a CDN) it doesn't matter how your website is built or what CMS it uses. You can change a single page — or more likely — entire sections.
- The ODN allows you to A/B split test these changes and both measure and predict their impact on organic traffic. They also have a feature called full-funnel testing[3] allowing you to measure impact on both SEO and CRO at the same time.
When you find something that works, you see a positive result like this:
SEO experimentation is great, but almost nobody does it right because it's impossible to control for other factors. Yes, you updated your title tags, but did Google roll out an update today? Sure, you sped up your site, but did a bunch of spam just link to you?
A/B split testing solves this problem by applying your changes to only a portion of your pages — typically 50% — and measuring the difference between the two groups. Fortunately, the ODN can deploy these changes near-instantly, up to thousands of pages at a time.
It then crunches the numbers and tells you what's working, or not.
Testing Google's UGC link attribute
For our first test, we decided to tackle something simple and fast. Craig