178 Living SEO Tests Updated Daily ... and GROWING!

Canaries in the Coal Mine SEO Tests

These are real pages ranking for real keywords doing very suspect things. We classify the tactics, problems, and bad behaviors and then we monitor them to see if Google ever does anything about them. They are the canaries in the coal mine so to speak. As long as the canary is alive and well in top positions I guess Google doesn't care to enforce the rules or fix the problem. Obviously that doesn't mean Google wont manually punish things. But knowing that Google never fixes things is important too.

The Coal Mines

A "Coal Mine" is a categorized area of conduct to be monitored. Ideally Coal Mines will have many samples or "Canaries" to monitor.

Coal Mine	Total Canaries	Alive Canaries	Dead Canaries	Alive and Better	Alive and Worse	Avg Positions Moved
Bot Detection	6	4	0	1	1	4.8
JavaScript Content	2	1	0	0	0	0
Keyword Stuffing	7	7	0	1	2	1.8
Nothing But Schema	1	1	0	0	0	0
Slow Render	3	2	0	0	1	-0.5
Stealth SEO	3	2	0	1	1	-0.5
Tuned Lorem Ipsum	6	3	0	0	1	-0.4

Will It Index (HTML) Tests

A "will it index" test is a test that checks if an imaginary keyword like "erufygsdjhgfdsjg" becomes findable when used in the specified zone of the page. Google periodically updates the zoning rules for SEO. We call these "Zoning Updates"

NOTE: Meta Description and JSON+LD scripts are known to boost even though you can't index a keyword from those zones alone. Will it boost and Will it Index tests need to be tested independently of each other.