Demystifying SEO with experiments
"Figure 4 shows the result of an experiment we ran to test rendering with JavaScript for better web performance. . . [The test failed and] even after we turned off the experiment, it took almost a month for pages in the enabled group to recover..."This is the incredibly frustrating part of White Hat SEO w/Google because:(a) At nearly every SEO conference, by Google's own actions in releasing Page Speed Insights, and by Matt Cutts engaging and talking about page speed being an important indicator it seems like speed is pretty !@$!@% important to Google and worth pouring resources into. (1) (2)(b) As a result a well equipped and well connected organization like Pinterest launches tests designed to improve this important signal. I'm going to assume they're organizationally smart enough to not damage or ignore other important Google signal ranks like usability, time on site, etc that you have to balance w/the JS page speed test.(3)(c) Google penalizes them.WTF!My frustration as a customer acquisition guy - encompassing CRO / SEM / SEO / etc - is that I try to discuss and push best practices for my own projects, for clients, and for public facing blogs / presentations / etc.I get that they don't want people gaming / pushing - but when they push out a "best practices" methodology like page speed, and then execute a penalty as described by Pinterest, I just want to throw my hands up.(1) https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/(2) http://www.webpronews.com/today-on-the-matt-cutts-show-page-...(3) I'm going to add the disclaimer of not having seen the JavaScript that pinterest used and perhaps they're not properly weighting / aware of other important SEO signals that GOOG penalizes when using Javascript, but I'm sure they are. Happy to answer more on that directly via my profile or this thread.