Maharshi

SEO Lab

Experiments, tests and observations from working in search.

SEO advice is full of confident claims nobody has tested. This is where I test them. Every experiment follows the same path, and results are only published when the test has run.

  1. Hypothesis
  2. Method
  3. Implementation
  4. Data
  5. Result
  6. Lesson
EXP-01In progress

Testing Internal Linking at Scale

Do rule-based contextual links from hub pages lift crawl frequency and impressions for deep pages? A controlled test with a holdout group.

  1. Hypothesis
  2. Method
  3. Implementation
  4. Result
  5. Lesson
Technical SEO500 ecommerce category URLs
EXP-02In progress

Do Orphan Pages Get Indexed? Sitemap-Only vs Linked Pages

Sitemap-only pages vs internally linked pages: which get indexed, how fast, and which stay indexed? A controlled test.

  1. Hypothesis
  2. Method
  3. Implementation
  4. Result
  5. Lesson
Technical SEO200 test URLs (100 orphan, 100 linked)
EXP-03In progress

Programmatic Templates: How Much Unique Content Before Pages Index and Rank?

Programmatic page variants at different unique-content ratios: which index, which rank, and where is the threshold? A controlled test.

  1. Hypothesis
  2. Method
  3. Implementation
  4. Result
  5. Lesson
Programmatic SEO300 programmatic pages across 3 density tiers
EXP-04In progress

Schema Markup and Rich Results: Does FAQ/HowTo/Product Markup Change CTR?

FAQ, HowTo and Product schema on matched page groups: do rich results appear, and does CTR change? A controlled test.

  1. Hypothesis
  2. Method
  3. Implementation
  4. Result
  5. Lesson
Technical SEO150 treated URLs across 4 schema types
EXP-05In progress

Topical Authority: Publishing a Complete Cluster vs Scattered Articles

A complete, interlinked topic cluster vs the same number of scattered articles: which earns more impressions and rankings? A controlled test.

  1. Hypothesis
  2. Method
  3. Implementation
  4. Result
  5. Lesson
Topical Authority40 articles across 2 cluster models
EXP-06In progress

AI Search Citations: What Gets Cited in AI Overviews and Answer Engines?

Which pages get cited in AI Overviews and answer engines, and does content formatting change it? A longitudinal observation plus variant test.

  1. Hypothesis
  2. Method
  3. Implementation
  4. Result
  5. Lesson
AI SEO120 queries across 4 engines
EXP-07In progress

JavaScript Rendering: Client-Side vs Server-Side Content and Indexing Speed

Identical pages served client-rendered vs server-rendered: how fast are they indexed, and is the indexed content complete? A controlled test.

  1. Hypothesis
  2. Method
  3. Implementation
  4. Result
  5. Lesson
Technical SEO60 test pages (SSR vs CSR vs Hybrid)

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