9,249 SEO Case Studies Reveal the Weirdest Tactics That Work

E1191: One SEO spent the summer going through more than 30,000 documents and narrowing them down to 9,249 SEO case studies, tests, and papers with measurable results.

The final dataset covered 552 cited sources and 182 SEO tactics.

I go through some of the weirdest findings, the tests I agree with, the ones I question, and the tactics worth experimenting with on your own sites.

Some of the findings:

- Writing title tags entirely in capital letters increased organic traffic 17.5% across two independent tests

- Removing synonym keywords from title tags reduced organic traffic 27%

- Removing the word "compare" from title tags increased organic traffic 24%

- Putting product prices in title tags reduced organic traffic 15%

- Number emojis in meta descriptions reduced organic traffic 5%

- Using a 410 instead of a 404 got removed pages dropped from Google's index much faster

- Editorial backlinks earned through digital PR increased organic sessions 71%

- Disavowing links without a manual penalty showed no measurable direction