Results of the MDN "Thin Pages" SEO experiment

MDN
#1

We’ve completed our first SEO experiment! In the “Thin Pages” experiment, we updated 20 pages whose content was unusually short (“thin”). The results weren’t quite what we expected.

If you’re curious what we found, and what conclusions we drew from the experiment, please see this post on my blog: Results of the MDN “Thin Pages” SEO experiment.

Comments or questions about the experiment or the report of the results should go in this thread.

Eric Shepherd
Senior Technical Writer
MDN Web Docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/
Blog: http://www.bitstampede.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sheppy

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#2

Cool experiment! How long do you think you’ll monitor the traffic for on these pages? I have found that SEO takes several months to really work.

#3

We talked about a cut-off at 6 month, this evaluation was done 3 month after the change.

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#4

As Kadir said, we’ll be looking at it again at the six month mark. Once we begin SEO as an ongoing project instead of just these experiments, the current plan is to have some ongoing monitoring of SEO data set up.

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#5

Also, of course, I’ve updated MDN’s “meta” documentation to incorporate the recommendations around avoiding “thin” pages, both in the body of the style guide but also in a new page I will be building out over the course of these experiments and beyond:

Sheppy