The Largest Community of
SEO Testers on the Web

  • 10+ SEO Tests conducted & published each month
  • Tests conducted under strict lab conditions and peer reviewed
  • Bi-monthly SEO testing mastermind meetups
  • All tests documented and published in easy to use indexable library
  • All tests contain actionable insights that you can execute on immediately
  • Become an IMG Tester and share in monthly cash prizes

Get unlimited access to over $15k worth of SEO tests,

courses & training for $97/month.

Direct access to the best kept SEO secrets

Learn with an elite team of SEO enthusiasts scientifically testing the inner workings of Google's algorithm.


Read the monthly tests to find out what's working and what's not and how to implement their findings. 


Watch the replays of the Testing Mastermind as the testers showcase the experiments they've been working on.

SEO Tests Catalogue

This is just a sample of the documented and peer reviewed SEO Tests on offer inside of IMG. Up to 10 new tests published monthly to keep you on top of what's working in Google right now.

Tester
Test Title
Hypothesis
Category
Tags

Ted Kubaitis

We are trying to see if Keyword Density is a ranking factor.

On-Page

Keyword Density

Ted Kubaitis

If Keyword Density is the factor then the match count tests will slot in around 10% because they were kept at around that density

On-Page

Keyword Density

Ted Kubaitis

Are broken script includes a negative ranking factor?

Technical

Site Errors, SEO Audits

Ted Kubaitis

Are broken images a negative ranking factor?

Technical

Site Errors, SEO Audits

Ted Kubaitis

Are broken script includes a negative ranking factor?

Technical

Site Errors, SEO Audits

Ted Kubaitis

Testing names with in Heading Tags (Known Entities?)

On-Page

 Heading Tags

Ted Kubaitis

Testing the diversity of different kinds of errors as a negative ranking factor.

Technical

Site Errors, SEO Audits

Ted Kubaitis

GSC recently started reporting on broken images. We are wondering about broken css includes.

Technical

Site Errors, SEO Audits

Ryan Hough

At least 50% of a page needs to be unique

On-Page

 Duplicate Content

Ryan Hough

At least 60% of a page needs to be unique  

On-Page

 Duplicate Content

Ryan Hough

Pages that are similar maybe filtered

On-Page

 Duplicate Content

Kyle Roof

The closer the page is to the .com the better it will rank.

Technical

Subfolders, Site Structure

Ted Kubaitis

Does having more ranking factors on a page increase rankings

On-Page

ALL THE FACTORS!

Lee Witcher

Stop words are ignored by Google.

YouTube SEO

Stop Words, Meta Data

Ted Kubaitis

Are headings with no keyword matches a factor? Lets test that.

On-Page

Heading Tags

Ted Kubaitis

Search Volume for a test keyword may impact index allocation for a keyword in the primary index

Technical

Google Bot, Crawling, Indexing

Lee Witcher

With HTML language declared as English, lorem ipsum and English test pages will rank equally well.

On-Page

Language Factors

Kyle Roof

Entities are a ranking factor

On-Page

Keywords, Entities

Ryan Hough

Unique keywords are not filtered

On-Page

Keywords, Duplicate Content

Roman Barnes

Does Google follow more than 4 Redirect Hops? 

Technical

Redirects

M. Isse

Is this an algorithmic or manual penality?

Off-Page

Manual Penalty

Laura Klein

An image optimized according to the Search Console Help recommendations will rank better in Google Image Results

On-Page

Image Optimization

Malte Böhm

I try to find out if comment links from an authoritative source influence the rankings.

Off-Page

DoFollow Comment Links

Kyle Roof

Rel=sponsored will not have any affect.

Off-Page

Backlinks

Mike Belanger

The more kw’s in CSS code (classes, etc) will not help with rankings.

On-Page

Technical

Kyle Roof

Google reads everything a in a title even if some of the title text is clipped by an ellipse (...) and the text is not visible in the SERPs

On-Page

Title

Vinay Karanam

Technically video with spoken words (specifically keywords) should rank best.

YouTube SEO

Technical

Kyle Roof

Google will crawl text in an iframe and will cache a page based on that content

On-Page

iFrames

Tom Chen

First H2 Tag can be placed anywhere in the content.

On-Page

Page Structure

Tom Chen

Google prefers content that are properly structured from H1 to H4.

On-Page

Page Structure

Beata Szoke

Google prefers faster websites.

On-Page

Technical

Beata Szoke

Google will prefer Blogger over other Web 2.0 platforms.

Off-Page

Web 2.0

Alex Guemez

Keywords in A Tags HREF are a ranking factor.

On-Page

Technical

Ted Kubaitis

Search variability tells us a lot about inclusion and rankings.

Case Study

Rank Tracking

Tom Chen

Having the keyword in the first 100 words provides a small boost.

On-Page

Primacy

David Meacham

Google will index the text in the video.

YouTube SEO

Image SEO

Marc Moeller

Putting the postcode and lat long next to the localized keyword will improve the ranking.

On-Page

Local SEO

Ted Kubaitis

There are indexing limits on single URLs.

Indexing

On-Page

Jo Priest

Test on subdomains shows similar results to multiple domains.

Testing

Subdomains

Vinay Karanam

Paid Promotion option should affect YouTube rankings,

YouTube SEO

Promotion

Terry Power

The presence of a relevant podcast might help rankings as it would provide another object to show Google relevance.

On-Page

Podcasts

Carolyn Holzman

By doing the same thing to set up test pages in Google, I should be able to get Bing to index pages and run some of the same tests we've been doing in Google by getting sites in Bing Webmaster.

On-Page

Bing

Kyle Roof

Google will cache text even though it is marked "disallow for crawlers"

On-Page

Bing

Tom Chen

Having the keyword multiple times in the first 100 words is a small boost to showing relevance of the content.

On-Page

Keywords

M Isse

301 Redirects trigger a change in how Google shows URLs.

Technical

URLs

Alex Guemez

Google will treat accent words differently.

On-Page

International

Marc Moeller

Canonical tags will pass link juice.

Technical

URLs

Lee Witcher

Keyword modifiers will display when hidden in an ARIA tag.

On-Page

Technical

Alex Guemez

Google reads keywords in A Title Tags.

On-page

Technical

Carolyn Holzman

Google uses NLP on meta descriptions.

On-page

NLP

Az Respes

Google orders titles in number order 1,2,3,4….

On-page

Content

Vinay Karanam

Random alpha triggers flags in YouTube accounts

YouTube SEO

Content

Lee Witcher

YouTube can be used as an indexer.

YouTube SEO

Indexing

Alex Guemez

Google Trends entities are better than Google Image entities.

On-page

Entities

Carolyn Holzman

Tight NLP clusters will beat loose NLP clusters.

On-page

NLP

Marc Moeller

Google ignores "static" ranking signals (links & on-page content) in favour of User/CTR signals and reshuffles search results if no positive CTR occurred.

Off-Page

CTR

Honey Witcher

Pages with higher entity density will index better than pages with zero entities.

On-Page

Entities

Jo Priest

You can get information if you recreate the SERPs in high competition landscapes

On-Page

SERPs

M Isse

Blogspot is good for testing.

Testing

Subdomains

Alex Guemez

Google will read keywords in <noscript> tags.

On-page

Technical

Carolyn Holzman

Google does not calculate keywords inside an image towards keyword density.

Images

Keywords

Vinay Karanam

If you spam and advertise on youtube videos with text to speech (TTS) software, by YouTube's policy your video & account will get suspended. In this test we put that theory to work.

YouTube SEO

Paid Traffic

Lee Witcher

Video citations will improve local rankings.

YouTube SEO

Citations

Beata Szoke

Google prefers and understands schema in the same language as the site content.

On-page

Schema

Simon White

Adding keywords to title tags will improve rankings and CTR

On-page

Title Tags

Honey Witcher

Google will read text on an image.

YouTube SEO

Thumbnails

Alex Guemez

Keywords in H4-H6 are a Ranking Factor.

On-Page

Heading Tags

Marc Moeller

The most expensive indexing service must have the best indexation rate.

Indexing

Tools

>