Page 26 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

Are Jump Links Indirect Ranking Signals?

Test Setup:

We have 3 tests to help us understand this better:

1. Implement jump links on multiple pages without a table of contents or any links going to
them internally tracking main page terms. This will show if there are any indirect ranking
signals from the “ID” tag. It will also show if the jump link is indexed in SERPs without it
being linked to.
2. Implement jump links on multiple pages using the table of contents and tracking the exact
heading “term” rankings to determine if we see an increase or decrease. This will help us
to get a more granular view on how the TOC links impact the rankings outside of
impressions.
3. Implement jump links on multiple pages without a table of contents. We would only link to
the jump links contextually from other pages on the website. This will tell us if ranking
fluctuations are more likely due to the TOC itself or the actual jump links.

Test Results: May 1, 2020

2 weeks into testing we had some awesome info from test #1 and #2. For Test #1, the ID tag didn't
seem to have any effect on the rankings itself. This makes sense as adding the ability to link to a
part of a page doesn't actually provide any value to the reader. We used the keyword
“qlrptsmedft” and added an ID for it to the H2 on the page:
https://mymarketer.online/learn-how-to-manage-your-reputation/#qlrptsmedft

Upon indexing we could not find any record in the SERPs for the term - searching for the specific
term, as well as “site:”. So we know these jump links are direct ranking signals.

For test #2, we wanted to test the linking in the glossary to these links, so we added jump links to
4 URLS. We tracked all of our headings in search, as well as our primary keywords.

The first thing to note was that we really didn't see any "positive" movement for our keywords
and that many of our headings started to get split tested in SERPs. While some terms started to
pop overall, we still saw a decrease in our tracked keywords and rankings.

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