Page 39 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

indexed websites on them. These sites had little to no live backlinks, with most of them being
lost years ago.

One of the most important observations was that all of the tests were EMD or PMD. They were
always niche relevant and most were also GEO relevant with the domain being servicecity.com.

We ran a second test on servicestate.com, which was a completely different state from where the
GMB was located - a title loans in Ohio website was redirected to a GMB CID URL in Miami. This
website and the snapshot above were both mass page websites with hundreds of pages indexed
and ranking for all types of service keywords with real traffic. The snapshot above was, in fact,
the third type of variation we ran, with the domain being servicestate.com where the URL was the
corresponding service and state of the GMB, but the previous site was not city-specific and was a
mass page website…

Our target terms were still ranking as of the update, showing slight improvements.

Now you can understand how different these 301 redirects are from the simple tests we ran using
expired or auction domains...

Which brings us to the last question. Why do we tend to see upward movement on the GMB
initially, followed by a decline? We have many GMB testing situations where the initial signal
increase leads to a brief “boost”, but frequently the ranking increases would not sustain. Once
the GMB gained more trust through more signals, reviews, images, etc., we would see the impact
of ongoing efforts becoming more consistent.

Because we try to remove as many variables as possible when testing, we tend to use GMB
listings with little to no optimization previously done to them. Listings with minimal optimization
or activity generally lack trust. We believe this lack of trust signals ultimately causes the boost
from effective signals to go away. Time to test on some heavily developed, well trusted GMBs!

Do 301 Redirects to GMB Listing Impact Local Rankings?

Test Setup:

In this test, we used one of our previous test sites that we ranked with archive content and PBN
links, as well as the image snippet test and duplicate content inner linking test. We redirected the
site from the registration level to the GMB listing.

Our test site was dentist-in-york.com, branded as "New Smile Dental in York". We chose a random
Dentist in York, Pennsylvania to redirect to, as we don't have a dentist GMB in the area (this is not

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