Comparing a Verywell Mind Page (YMYL Topic) in 2017 vs. 2024 to See How On-Page SEO Evolves (& Its Limits), a Hamsterdam History Lesson

By Ethan Lazuk

Welcome to a new lesson from Hamsterdam History! 🐹

If you’re new here, this is where we look at vintage SEO articles to acknowledge their contributors, gain historical context, and explore how things have changed since.

This week will be a bit different, though.

Instead of an SEO article, we’ll look at a Verywell Mind page on mindfulness meditation (a YMYL medical topic) at two different points in time — pre-Medic Update and post-HCU — to see how its on-page SEO has evolved.

To give you a preview of the findings, there were notable differences regarding:

• Categories
• Headings
• Writing style
• Authorship
• Imagery
• Multimodal content

We also learned why on-page SEO may have its limits, based on a query’s search intent(s).

Still intrigued?

Let’s hit it! 🤛

Up first, a little back story on the idea for this article.

I went to Google Search and typed in a medical query for a topic I’m familiar with: [what is mindfulness meditation].

When I did this on desktop, the AI Overview was prevalent.

And then when I switched to mobile, the knowledge panel took center stage.

Side note: That’s a good reminder to toggle between desktop and mobile in GSC performance reports, as those can be different experiences. (Say nothing of personalization.)

However, we see the same result in the traditional number one position both times: Verywell Mind’s Mindfulness Meditation page.

For the record, I’m not affiliated with this site, nor do I know much about it (stay tuned), although, I do practice what I share. 😉 🧘

One benefit of this page is that, according to the Ahrefs toolbar, it’d been around since 2003 (or so I thought; also stay tuned) and was updated in 2024:

Mindfulness meditation has Indian origins with Buddhism, which began in the 5th century BCE, so we know it hasn’t changed much in our lifetimes.

As a result, any content changes on the Verywell page would likely be related to other considerations.

By comparing the earliest version with the current version, we can see how elements of on-page SEO have evolved. 🙌

Seven years may not feel very long normally, but it’s a sizable chunk of time in SEO terms. 🕰️ ⌚️

As noted above, I’m not super familiar with Verywell Mind’s history.

However, their mindfulness page looks to have good SEO guidance applied.

Here’s the brand’s editorial process, for the record, as laid out in the about page:

Reading that page further, it appears Verywell Mind is part of Dotdash Meredith, “the largest digital and print publisher in America.”

Ironically, in last week’s Hamsterdam recap, I included a post that was railing against that company in the context of People Magazine. The author even mentioned, “VeryWell” (with a capital “W”; stay tuned).

We’re balanced here in Hamsterdam. 😇

I encourage you to check out that post and the company to form your conclusions. (Or as a TOOL show might remind us, “Think for yourself.”) 🪬

With that, let’s dig into some (site) history of Verywell Mind, then do our on-page SEO comparison.

It looks like Verywell Mind’s domain first took off with over 4k pages in February 2018, per Ahrefs site overview.

Maybe there was a domain migration or rebrand?

Hey, we likely guessed right!

Dotdash Meredith emerged in 2017, and Verywell even got a mention in its Wikipedia page:

Some good samaritan should lowercase that “W,” though. 😉

If the ownership or branding did change, that might add even more context for our comparison of the page’s SEO, right?

Digging deeper, today’s domain is “VerywellMind.com,” but the Verywell Wikipedia page lists it as “Verywell.com.”

There’s also a “VerywellHealth.com” domain, where the original one redirects to:

Does that mean Verywell Mind is a different entity, related to mental health?

Yep, that looks to be the case:

Cool, we’re now experts on these websites!

That also likely means we’ll have to do some digging to find that 2003 version of the mindfulness meditation page.

Well, since we’re here for a historical on-page SEO comparison, let’s get jammin’!

All screenshots of earlier page versions will be from WayBack Machine.

Once I started, something unexpected happened.

I clicked a December 2003 crawl of “Verywell.com” and it 302 redirected to “ManEurope.com”:

Your guess is as good as mine. 🤷

There’s also a gap for that domain from 2005 until 2016:

The missing piece — the Verywell Wikipedia page says, “It was launched on 26 April 2016 as a media property of About.com.”

That makes sense, but then why did the Ahrefs Toolbar show a publish date of 2003?

As it turns out, the page’s article schema includes that date:

Who wants to bet the original page is on About.com?

Let’s check:

The best I could find was “buddhism.about.com/od/mindfulness/,” which has a lot of content, including this page:

I don’t see a whole lot of similarities.

If I had to guess, these pages were likely consolidated at some point (or just redirected), and the original publish date from the page was kept.

Well, we were partly right. That page does redirect, but not to Verywell Mind.

Instead, it goes to Learn Religions, with a detour through Thought Co.:

Ah, that makes sense now:

I still don’t know the origins of the 2003 publish date though. 🤔

Anyway, let’s now compare the page’s current version with its oldest available, which is from March 2017.

Either way, this is still before Google’s Medic broad core update (early August 2018).

It’s also several years prior to the helpful content system (August 2022) and the third HCU (September 2023).

Therefore, it represents an arguably different era of SEO, what we might call the pre-Medic and HCU era. (For the record, I call today the post-HCU era. Even though the helpful content system was absorbed into Google’s core systems, its third update still caused a sea change, in my mind.)

Let’s start by looking at the 2017 version of the page above the fold.

Its category is “Meditation,” and the main heading is “Mindfulness Meditation.”

It was also authored by Cathy Wong, ND, and Reviewed by Richard N. Fogoros, MD.

There are also social share buttons, plus a featured image that’s from Getty Images.

The opening text includes a subheading, “What is mindfulness meditation,” while the first sentence reads, “Mindfulness is a practice that involves being fully engaged in whatever is going on around you.”

Let’s now compare that with today’s page.

Its category is “Mindfulness and Meditation,” and the main heading is “What to Know About Mindfulness Meditation” with a subheading that reads, “Notice your thoughts and get grounded.”

It was authored by Kendra Cherry, MSEd, and reviewed by Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD.

There’s now a table of contents, and the featured image is a custom infographic.

The first sentence reads, “Mindfulness meditation is a mental training practice that teaches you to slow down racing thoughts, let go of negativity, and calm both your mind and body.”

How are the 2017 and 2024 versions of the page different (above the fold)?

Here’s a summary:

• 💁 Category is broader: “Mindfulness and Meditation” vs. “Meditation.”
• ✔ Main heading is more specific: “What to Know About Mindfulness Meditation” vs. “Mindfulness Meditation.”
• 🍃 Subheading is more natural: The subheading describes the content, “Notice your thoughts and get grounded” and is now below the main heading vs. “What is mindfulness meditation?” above the first sentence.
• 📝 Authorship: The authors and reviewers are different, while the reviewer is now described as a medical reviewer.
• 🙅 No more social share buttons: The new version has none (that I saw).
• 🏓 Table of contents: The old version had none.
• 🖌️ Custom featured image: The featured image is a custom infographic that previews the topic vs. a stock image.
• 🗣️ Detailed opening sentence: The opening sentence goes into more detail about the benefits of mindfulness meditation vs. explaining what it is.

⭐️ In short, the new version is more natural and helpful (delivers more value in exchange for the user’s time spent), which means it’s better for SEO in the post-HCU world, I’d argue.

Looking at the rest of the content, it’s also quite different.

In fact, I won’t bother showing Diffchecker here because none of the lines compared.

Looking deeper, here are more on-page or other related differences:

• 🏔️ Topical coverage: New page has more depth of content.
• 🪜 Heading structure: New page has more subheadings to break up the text.
• 👉 Bullet points: New page has more bulleted sections with contrasting brand colors.
• 🎥 Multimodal: New page has an embedded video to complement the topic.
• ✍️ Author bio: New page has an author bio and photo.
• 🕸️ Internal linking: New page has more contextual links plus more related reading links.
• 🤝 Other UX updates: New page has quotes with brand colors as well as more sources now in a dropdown.
• 🙋 User feedback: New page has a way for users to give feedback.
• 💰 Ads: Old page had 0 ads compared to multiple on the new page. (It’s also possible the ads weren’t captured on the old page in WayBack Machine, but I generally see them if they were there at the time.)

⭐️ Aside from the ads (including a video that auto plays in the corner), the updates make the page more helpful for readers to navigate to the information they want, particularly on mobile devices, or to engage with different media, like video.

This aligns with being helpful content, which I define as delivering a high value-to-time ratio.

To sum it up in a few words:

• The 2017 version was good content.
• It just wasn’t as naturally written or helpfully constructed (page experience) as the 2024 version.

But one last question. How have these changes impacted the page’s organic search performance?

Well, unless we owned the site or had access to the full story (and data), we couldn’t say for sure.

However, let’s plug the URL into Ahrefs and see what we see.

Here’s the organic traffic overview for all time:

That’s a roller-coastery (sic) trend line. 🎢

Despite the improvements, the page is reported to have a pretty similar level of traffic as when it started (a tad higher now).

Since we don’t have first-party data, it’s hard to say if this is really what’s happening, or if it’s related to quirks in ranking fluctuations of certain high-volume keywords.

It’s also interesting that the drops seem to happen in the summer (July or August) or the winter (January or February).

As a caveat, I’m not a big keyword rankings person (anymore). I prefer to focus on cumulative organic visibility in a holistic context.

With that said, it looks like the page’s rankings (and featured snippet) for the query [mindfulness meditation] could be responsible for a lot of variance:

In case you’re on mobile, the data above basically says the position of the keyword dropped from 1st to 5th compared with two years ago (the furthest back my Ahrefs account level shows me), resulting in a traffic change from ~13k to 116.

Also, that query has pretty broad search intent.

Looking at the SERP, it could have branded affiliations (navigational intent) for Mindful (or that site’s content wins for other reasons) and secondarily be heavy on practical and auditory or visual (video) intent.

Perhaps that’s why the Verywell Mind page now has a video.

Looking at the position history for [mindfulness meditation], the SERP seems to have a lot of fluctuation, especially with the August 2023 core update and third HCU giving more love to Mindful (dark green and blue):

Isolating for Verywell Mind’s page, we see it’s been pretty stable, and really only suffered a drop around March 2023 (timed with a core update):

Again, my Ahrefs subscription only goes back 2 years, so it’s hard to say what happened from 2017 to 2022.

That said, let’s look at the page’s March 2023 version for clues:

It’s actually kind of a mix of the two, right?

Stylistically, it’s closer to the 2024 version, except it has the old category and subheading (but now as its main heading). It also doesn’t have a video yet.

But then how’s the page doing since Google’s last significant (March 2023 core) update?

It appears to be on an upswing for certain relevant and higher-volume keywords, it’s just not recovering for [mindfulness meditation]:

Even still, I would argue the page being more natural and helpful is upping its visibility (seen here in the context of rankings for qualified queries). 🙌

Of course, rankings are an increasingly smaller piece of the equation. 🫡

But also, not everything is in the hands of an SEO and their strategy.

If Google sees [mindfulness meditation] as partly a navigational query (possibly) or returns video results on how to meditate, that’s kind of out of Verywell Mind’s hands.

It’s an intent shift, not a quality issue.

Perhaps having an instructional video be the main content of another page or hosted on another video or social platform could be one angle to support their page.

That said, looking at Mindful, it’s aligned with some influential and prestigious voices in the mindfulness space:

So I can only imagine their content’s appeal, coming from a brand tied to such authoritative figures:

In conclusion, I suppose we could say:

“On-page SEO, E-E-A-T your heart out!” 😅

Just in case that last part fired you up, let’s keep it chill.

Do it with me:

🧘

In (2, 3, 4), hold (2, 3, 4), and out (2, 3, 4).

In (2, 3, 4), hold (2, 3, 4), and out (2, 3, 4).

In (2, 3, 4), hold (2, 3, 4), and out (2, 3, 4).

😌 ✌️

Outro

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s Hamsterdam History lesson! 🐹

I personally learned (or was reminded of the fact) that you can’t go wrong when you create more natural-sounding and helpful content (high value-to-time ratio).

That said, it also doesn’t hurt to be among the best at what you do, especially when people know that about your brand.

You can view the 2017 and 2024 versions of that Verywell Mind page if you’d like to explore doing your own comparisons.

📝 Update (7/15): I came across a recent Verywell Mind page in Google Discover called “How Metta Meditations Can Help You Cultivate Compassion” by Hannah Owens, the Mental Health/General Health Editor for Dotdash Meredith. It’s great read and complement to the topic. 🙌

Feel free to share your feedback below or contact me with it.

Stay tuned for more Hamsterdam content next week, or check out related posts below.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂

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