Discussion g/general 14d ago

@geo_tom

I will share mine: that correlations in SEO are not causation. For the first two years of my career, I made dozens of changes to client sites based on patterns I noticed: 'clients with more internal links seem to rank better', 'sites with faster load times seem to outperform', 'adding more words to pages seems to improve rankings'. Some of these were real relationships. Many were coincidences or confounded by other variables. The lesson that changed my thinking was realising that the only way to test an SEO hypothesis properly is to change one thing at a time on similar pages and observe the difference over a long enough period to rule out natural variance. Almost no one does this rigorously, which is why so much SEO advice is essentially oral tradition passed down without evidence. I am now much more skeptical of my own pattern-matching and much more interested in the handful of practitioners who actually run controlled experiments. What about you? What took you the longest to learn? It does not have to be a technical lesson — could be about clients, business, or the industry itself.

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