It Turns Out That People Are Terrible at Answering This Question
It turns out that people are terrible at answering this questioni thought that answering this with greater accuracy than a coin flip was going to be a pretty low bar. As you saw from the sneak peak of my results above, that turned out not to be the case. Reckon you can do better? Skip ahead to take the test and find out.
(in fact, if you could find a way to test this effectively, I wonder if it would make a good qualifying question for the next moz ranking factors survey. Should you only listen only to the opinion of those experts who are capable of answering with reasonable accuracy? Note that my test that follows isn’t at all rigorous because you can cheat by googling the keywords — it’s just for entertainment purposes).
Take the Test and See How Well You Can Answer
With my curiosity piqued, I put together a simple test, thinking it would be interesting to see how good expert seos actually are at this, as well as to see how well laypeople do.
I’ve included a bit more about the methodology Crypto Email List and some early results below, but if you’d like to skip ahead and test yourself you can go ahead here.
Note That to Simplify the Adversarial Side
I’m going to let you rely on all of google’s Doctors Eamil List spam filtering — you can trust that every url ranks in the top 10 for its example keyword — so you’re choosing an ordering of two pages that do rank for the query rather than two pages from potentially any domain on the internet.
I haven’t designed this to be uncheatable — you can obviously cheat by googling the keywords — but as my old teachers used to say: “If you do, you’ll only be cheating yourself.”
Unfortunately, google forms seems to have removed the option to be emailed your own answers outside of an apps domain, so if you want to know how you did, note down your answers as you go along and compare them to the correct answers (which are linked from the final page of the test).
You can try your hand with just one keyword or keep going, trying anywhere up to 10 keywords (each with a pair of pages to put in order). Note that you don’t need to do all of them; you can submit after any number.
