Page 16 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

Update: April 24, 2020

As of the last update, there was little movement for our main terms but a large increase in
impressions, and Google testing the site in the SERPs.

What is the Impact of Adding Years in Duplicate Content?

Test Setup:

While we were running our duplicate content tests we noticed improvements when adding dates
to content or the title. For example, "Best Shopping Guide Online" vs "Best 2020 Shopping Guide
Online". We wondered if adding the year provided some sort of boost for the extra data point.

Test Results: March 27, 2020

When we updated the year in the duplicate content from 2019 to 2020, our rankings went up.
Google actually seemed to segment the content relevance by date, similar to how they do for
local search. Remember, local organic search uses a geo algorithm to an extent, meaning every
local query is essentially its own SERP. This is why you can use the same duplicate content on a
website. Just change the target NAP and geolocation and you will still rank it as usual.

Well, it looks as though Google looks at dates similar to geolocation. When we looked at SERPs
for articles with dates, they seemed to start to pop for all the old original content keywords
(without a date). So we went and checked the index and they definitely had lost rankings, even
though their article was still indexed and showing in search...

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