Where does this intuition come from?
Posted: Sat Jan 18, 2025 6:40 am
We live in a world where data is increasingly available to guide our decisions. Anecdotal experience should no longer suffice, and the data is pretty clear. There is no reason to be solely data-driven, but to be inspired by data.
A decades-old insight about the keyword in the title It may stem from experiments that showed that if you took two literally identical pages and put a gibberish keyword in the title doctor phone number list tag of one of the pages, the page that had the keyword in the title would beat the page that didn't have it, for the gibberish word.
The winning page (with the keyword in the title) could potentially have gained a marginal effect like 0.0001 index points. Of course, it could also have won by a huge margin, and everything in between.
This is why it doesn't help us much: we don't know anything about the size of the effect! Furthermore, the amount of data is small, so we know little about the stability of these results, although it is reasonable to think that the experiment could be easily replicated.
A decades-old insight about the keyword in the title It may stem from experiments that showed that if you took two literally identical pages and put a gibberish keyword in the title doctor phone number list tag of one of the pages, the page that had the keyword in the title would beat the page that didn't have it, for the gibberish word.
The winning page (with the keyword in the title) could potentially have gained a marginal effect like 0.0001 index points. Of course, it could also have won by a huge margin, and everything in between.
This is why it doesn't help us much: we don't know anything about the size of the effect! Furthermore, the amount of data is small, so we know little about the stability of these results, although it is reasonable to think that the experiment could be easily replicated.