I've seen it mentioned a lot when it comes to content writing tips online, and quite a few SEO plugins like Yoast grade your work on it as part of their toolset.
Yet at the same time, I've never really found any evidence it actually makes a statistically noticeable difference to the popularity of a website or article. Every news site I went to failed miserably when random articles there were tested against it, yet I didn't seem to notice any correlation between the resulting scores and the popularity/reputation of the site in question. Their SEO wasn't being hurt, the people in the comments and social media didn't care less and everything else just seemed normal regardless.
So does it matter here? Is there a study showing sites or publications with a better score on this do better in some way?
Does anyone know?
