Recently, our SEO company Voltier Inc took on a local used car dealer in West Palm Beach, Florida, as a client. We were hired to bring customers to the dealership through referrals from the website. This is mainly done through leads generated on the website and interest in various vehicles that are displayed on the website. In conjunction with doing various on page SEO, it has been my job to get this site indexed (as it had 0 pages indexed on all search engines when my work began). Things were progressing fairly steadily, but with only around a month of link building, I'd seen only modest results in Google and Yahoo. As many would expect, it was fairly easy to rank well in MSN for our top keywords. Our rankings for Yahoo and Google, however, for the following keywords (or some variation of), have not seen much progress:
Used Car West Palm Beach, Used Car Dealer Palm Beach, Palm Beach Used Cars, florida used cars
Now comes the interesting part.
As Part of our Link Building efforts, I released a number of articles meant as Link Bait. I wrote an article about airbag fraud, about best SEO practices for car dealers, the most dangerous drivers on the road, and a few others. The brainstorming was slow going, but on a whim I came up with an idea I thought could possibly be popular on a site like Digg or Reddit. The bad part was that the article didn't really have anything to do with used cars....
The article.
What I came up with was an article entitled "8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers." Essentially, it was just a compilation of 8 different Discovery Health specials, with YouTube videos and Wikipedia references. It took about about 10 minutes to write, and it was online about a half hour after the conception of the idea. I decided to post the article on Reddit first, because it seemed that articles there were less easily buried. What happened was astonishing.
The Climb.
In the first 45 minutes I saw a steady climb in votes from Reddit. The article remained at the top of the Science page in Reddit, and made it onto the front page of Reddit "Hot" within an hour. It continued climbing the Reddit Hot page (non-science category) until it had reached the number one position.
When the article was first posted to Reddit, it included a "Digg" buttion, and was submitted to Digg. The Digg button was located at the top of the page, and even through the climb of the article via Reddit, there were only a few more diggs (around 8). After the article hit the front page of Reddit, however, I decided to place an additional Digg button at the bottom of the page, assuming people would decided to Digg the article only after they had read it through. At this point, the article started to receive massive amounts of Diggs. Within an hour of being on the front page of Reddit, the article went from 8 - 110 - 250 - 450 Diggs. The article rose through the ranks on Digg, and within 3 hours had made it to the front page, with over 800 Diggs. As the night progressed, it continued to rise on Digg, and became the number two story of the day, with over 2,000 Diggs. The story also entered the top ten on Digg, and by 11pm that night (8-9 hrs after submission to Reddit) it had reached the Number 1 position on Digg's top ten. As it stands today, the article is the 191st most Dugg submission in the past 365 Days.
The Traffic.
The following are my traffic results from the "Super Digg." Keep in mind that these results are unadulterated insofar as the site was receiving under 100 unique visitors per day before the submission to Digg and Reddit, and are therefore not skewed.
First 4 Days:
Top Referring Sources:
As you can see, being on the top of Digg and Reddit gets you some serious traffic, but not just from those two sources. Not only did our page make it to del.icio.us popular, but it made it to the front of some very high traffic sites, such as Ebaumsworld.com and Gorillamask.net. As you can see, within five days, we received a total of almost 234,000 unique visitors. As it stands now, we are continuing to see traffic from sites such as ebaumsworld, although the main link is far from the front page. Additionally, we received significant traffic referrals from webmail clients such as gmail and yahoo mail, meaning our links were most likely being shared over email as well.
Alexa Rankings After The Digg:
Another astonishing fact was how our website moved up the rankings on Alexa. We went from being ranked around 1,200,000 to ranking at 120,000 in just 5 days. This means our boost was nearly enough to put us on the Movers and Shakers list, and put us well above the rankings of some very well established websites. We are particularly interested to see how this ranking drops again to previous levels. The chart signifies how Alexa saw everything.
How Adsense Treated Us:
*Funny Sidenote: there were relevant Amazon ads on the site as well. They received 200,000 impressions. We made $1.00.
The Aftermath.
Above all else, we are interested in how our "Super Digg" will affect our backlinks and our position in the SERPS. Our particular scenario can help shed some light on a few questions. First, what is the effect of a large number of backlinks that are not well targeted to your site's content? We already know that untargeted backlinks are not nearly as effective as targeted ones from authority sites with similar content. The Digg did, however, produce links from many sites with authority in areas that are not entirely unrelated, and in some cases, from some sites with very high traffic and trust. Secondly, how long does this effect last, and how long does it take for its effects to be seen? Below are the number of backlinks seen by Yahoo Site Explorer before and since the Digg.
Backlinks:
Before The Digg: 207 Backlinks
3 Days After Digg: 1,270 Backlinks
5 Days After Digg: 2,642 Backlinks
7 Days After Digg: 3,545 Backlinks
Technorati:
Before The Digg: 0 Links
After: 138 Links
Del.icio.us
Before the Digg: 0 Links
After the Digg: 532 Links
Changes in the SERPS.
Google's latest crawl (7 days after the Digg) resulted in a huge increase in our rankings for our targeted keywords. We jumped up anywhere from 20-300 places, with most of our most important keywords ranking in the top ten (many in the top 5). Furthermore, Google has increased its rate of indexing, has increased the number of our pages that appear in the index, and have released over a dozen important pages from the supplemental results.
However, No Backlinks Have Registered In Google Webmaster Tools (7 days after digg)
Yahoo, while giving us credit for our backlinks, has done almost nothing in terms of ranking us better in the SERPS. Additionally, the number of our pages in their index has actually decreased.
More Interesting Factors to Note:
1.) The Page that was dugg was experimental, and was not linked to our main page in any way. There was no link from the dugg page to our main site and there was no link on our main site to this page. (This was partially due to the fact that we did not desire any digg traffic on our main site, as our site desires only highly targeted local traffic.) The only connection between our main site and the dugg page was that they reside on the same domain.
2.) The dugg page has absolutely none of the keywords we have attempted to rank for on our main site. It does not link to or discuss any topics or other pages that are related to the keywords or topics of our main site.
3.) The dugg page ranks very highly for a great number of the keywords it contains, but does not rank first for the words in its title.
This article was written for the purpose of input. I am very interested in anyone's opinions, ideas, or predictions about these results. I will be updating this blog post with additional information as it becomes available so we can track the true long term effects of this type of event. Has anyone else tracked anything this large? Has anyone else had long term experience in this arena. I know Rand has tracked some data regarding backlinks after a digg, and the link bump effect, but what are others thinking?
-Daniel Tynski
Note from Rand - Daniel's site, Voltier, was taken down by an insane traffic load from Digg, Reddit, & others today (which is why the hosted images above aren't displaying). Given time, I have no doubt they'll recover - many congrats for putting together some great linkbait, and better luck holding together the server next time; it's certainly an issue we at SEOmoz can empathize with.
Disease #9
Addiction to Digg and social media-
Superhuman powers - ability to launch websites into the stratosphere with only your fingertips.
I wonder if Google will want this to be effective in the long run. I think at heart they want to simply be the accurate search engine, and the crux of this is that it caused all kinds of SERP change but in a way totally unrelated to the topic matter of the core site/domain, as explained by Daniel. If they wanted to be truly accurate they wouldn't want this kind of linkbait have such an egregious effect on SERP (or... would they?).
This makes me wonder how long the domain is going to last as a sort of trust/information aggregator in search terms. The "8 diseases" article was obviously relevant to a lot of people for a time, but it was thematically linked to a used car site. There's nothing saying your site can only have one theme of course, but in this case an amusing article about rare conditions led to an a relatively unwarranted increase in the search "power" of the car site. This is mostly because of the fact that Google's (and everyone else's) lowest common denominator seems to be the domain; used cars and 8 diseases were on the same domain ergo they both benefit. Obviously it wasn't that simple and it took some SEO wrangling to wring the most benefit, but that wrangling couldn't have occurred without that initial assumption on Google's part.
The social marketing movement seems to be more about "what specific page is interesting RIGHT NOW" as opposed to "what domain is authoritative for this topic". I think SM is a bit too flakey/exploitable/relatively lacking informational value to have that big of an effect on "real" searching (academic research, shopping, obscure saturday morning cartoons) right now but it's interesting to see what the hybrid of classic search ranking and SM is producing. I wonder, as time goes on, if they'll grow closer or further apart.
It is a very interesting blog entry, but I have yet to see anyone ask the question I woul have asked.
Did this sudden spike in popularity of the article you wrote help your client sell any vehicles?
If it did not, it seems to me like it was an interesting experiment, but not what the client should be paying for.
Our client's traffic from google, and thus the number of leads we recieve each day have more than doubled. No doubt this will result in an increase in auto sales.
I understand that traffic increased and kudos to you guys for getting it done as it was very impressive, (almost as impressive as the five seo excuses example) but it seems to me that it was not targeted traffic and I would truly be interested to see how it impacted your client's bottom line.
Very good question classa, Dan? ;)
Well actually, we knew from the beginning the traffic would absolutely be worthless to the client, even damaging if a significant portion of the traffic made its way to their true page. The purpose was to help a site that was relatively unknown get a little bit of authority. It was the backlinks we were interested in. In the post I mentioned we had no link from the dugg article to the clients main site. The idea was to increase the relevency of the entire domain, if possible, through a widely popular and well linked page on the same domain. We found it was possible. The increase in SERP positioning already has benefitted our client.
I suppose another interesting finding from the "experiment" was that digg users are perhaps not as inquisitive as one would expect, and very very rarely make the effort to manually change the url to the root site, just to take a look at what else might be there. Out of the more than 250,000 unique visitors, we probably got less than 150 actually going to our main domain.
Good post... one comment:
>>>Yahoo, while giving us credit for our backlinks, has done almost nothing in terms of ranking us better in the SERPS
Yahoo doesn't give you "credit" for links the second they find them. It's pretty agreed in the SEO community that there is a "waiting period" before you get full effect of links from Yahoo. Secondly, Yahoo doesn't have a "rolling update" like Google and updates every few weeks, so you'll be waiting a bit to see any (if there are any to see) results in Yahoo.
Yup...Yahoo is always behind in one way or another...
Thanks for sharing this, Daniel, and with what detail level!
In your opinion (or in the opinion of seomoz readers), what is the best day of the week to submit a story on social media sites, with the aim of reaching the largest potential audience? And what the best hour of the day?
TheHoff: Okay, I saw that one already.
TheHoff: What is the link on your how to survive a Digg article?
allen stern: I think Rand allowed Daniel's post so we can discuss, share and learn more about link bait and how Google responds to social traffic. I don't think Daniel's post being here is promoting the use of non-relevant viral content to promote site.
>>>I wonder what the client has to say about allowing their agency to create content not related to their company just to get some hits.
Er, think they go more than just traffic.
>>>I would never propose this to a client.
I won't either. I would propose relevant link bait and Matt Cutts claims that content can be link bait content and white hat at the same time.
Matt Cutts:
"I hereby claim that content can be both white-hat and yet still be wonderful “bait” for links (e.g. Danny’s spam email analysis). And generating information or ideas that people talk about is a surefire way to generate links. Personally, I’d lean toward producing interesting data or having a creative idea rather than spouting really controversial ideas 100% of the time."
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-linkbait-and-linkbaiting/
merged.ca/monetize/2006_06_24/will-your-website-survive-a-digg/
(or google -- survive a digg)
Nothing revolutionary, but a basic guide for someone who might have a webpage and not realize it is the number of images not the size of them that will kill you in a digg or /.
This is one of the best posts on the blog. Congrats on the success of your page. Also, thanks for sharing this info in so much detail.
I have to agree with EGOL. This is by far one of the best offerings of the YOUmoz contributors.
I took a moment to browse through both your sites and I'm impressed that all your articles follow the same format that you described during your linkbait brainstorming. Keep up the great work!
I've had a couple of articles dugg in January and saw similar trends in traffic and backlinks. My two articles received about 700 and 800 diggs each and now Yahoo shows ~6k backlinks, up from originally ~200.
Visitors stats:11,701 digg2,528 stumbleupon1,306 del.icio.us
At the time I wasn't really trying to get ranked for anything specific, but now get a lot of Google organic traffic for terms related to those two articles. Yahoo and MSN referrers have been virtually zero.
Thanks for sharing
Reuben
Daniel - your post went around my department and back - domain matters. Thanks for the study.
Anne-
Nothing like creating content that is absolutely not related to the site just to try to get traffic that is not related to what you want in an attempt to get higher rankings.
This makes SEO companies look bad frankly. It is a bit shocking that a company like SEOMoz, a leader in the biz, would make this appear on the home page.
And in addition, the 2,000 ads on the page is so 1998. Why not put some white text on a white background.
I wonder what the client has to say about allowing their agency to create content not related to their company just to get some hits. Of course most people think used car shops are low, so maybe they are ok with this. I would never propose this to a client.
Be careful. For now your on topic terms have increased in rank, but if you go too far off topic for too long you might run the risk of getting flagged as having a site about something completely off topic.
It's not as much of an issue as I was seeing a few years back, but I'm pretty sure it is still a small risk.
"As you can see, within five days, we received a total of almost 234,000 unique visitors."
Congrats & great article Daniel , that is indeed a super-digg. Our most recent superdigg (I define a superdigg as +1000 diggs) pulled +2400 diggs and 190,000 total page views.
Day 1: 48,000
Day 2: 115,000
Day 3: 10,000
Day 4: 6,000
Page views halve each day after this.
Of course, the only issue I have with superdiggs is the audience is incredibly transient. I noted the page views per visitor during the site's superdigg and then compared it to the huge number of exit points (especially to voltier.com :P) . To grow value for your client's website, I'd focus on relevant upsell/cross-sell opportunities on that article internally. For example, our news website:
That will not only increase the number of page views for those CPM-based revenue models but drive leads if the content is relevant. The problem in this instance is the irrelavant content but then again, if the goal of the article was to increase page rank and get the site indexed... i think you did just fine ;-)Finally, be careful how you use the metric 'Unique visitors'. The web analytics crew are fairly anal about the term. Do you mean daily visitors (or sessions or visits), daily unique visitors, daily unique browsers or monthly unique visitors? :) From the charts, it looks like daily visitors?
Daniel thanks for a really great post! Very interesting stuff and helpful.
I saw similar numbers from my "Super Digg" -- 20,000+ uniques the first day and a ton of trust and pagerank followed. My first dugg story was about the spammer getting billions of pages indexed and ranking on Google -- about 1600 Diggs, front page of Reddit, Techmeme, etc. It then led to a number of interesting links, including the Guardian, Zdnet, and Battelle's PR8 homepage.
Like you, the topic was on a blog well away from the main site but the main site has benefitted tremendously -- now ranking in the top 30 on G for some competitive phrases (web design, web designers) and still moving up.
Seeing the success of the first story, I wrote another article two days later... How to help your site survive a Digg. It also got to the front page and even beat the first one with 1640 diggs. It received a number of PR6+ links including one from Slate. Both articles continue to bring in new traffic and links over half a year after their publication.
It is tough to scam the social sites for long without getting buried but if you can offer something truly newsworthy or fascinating (I dugg that medical mysteries article myself!) then the traffic and more importantly trust flow can be substantial. Now with the trust of the domain, even with a young age, it ranks for most any term quite easily (witness Ted Leonsis).
aaarggghhh!!!!
its all so tantalising ... but what about the content!
the issue is coming up with that red hot post whicih taps into users interests.
I have been trying to find somesone to write for my company for ages and still no joy. I cant talk to our communicaitons team becaseu all they understand is how to pump out mundane pap which is there version of PR
So im still looking. maybe someday that magic person will appear and I'll get into the ring with you other master link bators
the quest goes on
You Mr. Tynski are a dirty rotten spammer. And all of you so called SEO's giving him your accolades ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I hope Google reads this post and bans your site.
Wow, Millard! Many "white hat" SEOs are spammers. Using robots to keep the search engine from seeing what humans see is no different than cloaking, and don't tell me you've never purchased a link. Even if he is a spammer, this is a very good post and deserves our accolades. It's not often you get helpful information for free with raw numbers to back it up. Keep doing what you're doing Tynski!
well interesting post...
but does yahoo give us credit for our links?
regards,
jean
https://www.jean.ghalo.com
I noticed that you bought or snuck a "used car" link into an edu page.
https://www2.bc.edu/~lewbel/jugweb/science-1.html
I contacted the professor that wrote the page to see if he'd sell me a link, but my guess is that an unscrupulous student (and SEO firm) snuck one by him.
Is this how you got on the first page of Digg too? This gives SEO a bad name I think.
Great information. I was just studying how to create a circle of bookmarks. This link baiting information can be applied and super charged by building a circle of bookmarks. The idea is to use your distinct profile url's for the different bookmarking sites alternately submitting to one another then pinging each sites to give search engine spiders a circle of links to follow and increase the value of backlinks.
I have red this article before it was seomozized. I miss a part. Have you had a cut?
Interesting post, this is the kind of post I want to read more. This is one of the best posts on the blog.
https://health-and-beautyproducts.blogspot.com/
I love reading case studies of the effects of viral pieces. Thanks for sharing your data and findings.
This is good news and a very informative article..keep up the good work.
Content is king. The article ("8 Diseases...") was compelling. You can do all the SEM in the world, but your story/ content must be compelling. Secondly, it's too bad that the Yahoo SERPs were not impacted. The major search engines are the most widely adopted forms of finding information on the web. The social bookmarking concept is not as widely adopted (yet). Does anyone know approximately what % of internet users use social bookmarking sites as a primary form of information gathering?
Thanks for posting - a great read on SMO.
This comment is extraordinarily late....and I don't know if anyone is going to read this.....but......I found this topic and the results fascinating. Its several months later, and I spoke with Daniel today as a follow up.
The business site still has first page google rankings for its money terms. Prior to the super digg it didn't rank for anything. From the conversation it appeared that the significant and dramatic step that drove this site into relevant serps rankings was simply the super effect of the digg. From our conversation it didn't appear to me that other bl efforts were signficant enough to cause the kind of jump the site had. Daniel referenced that the business/site owner let the url registration lapse....so that had a somewhat neg impact on serps....but they are still first page.
Now several months later the business site gets (per Daniel) about 100 or more money term serps hits which has gotta be great for a used car dealer. Couple of sales at x thousands of dollars per car...goes a long way to making that SEO effort very worthwhile.
A very fascinating experiment from A - Z.
Dave
There are lots of resources out there about the "digg effect". How much of the traffic you got then actually translates in constant traffic later ? I know I'm here now and I love the article.
I'll blog on this at https://bynapse.blogspot.com, leave me a line.
Keep up the good work !
I do not consider this to be spam. This is PR and marketing. Internet Marketing has many ethical methods that all are fair and appropriate. You do not need to hope Google reads this post, because it already happened and that is how I came to read this article by typing in to Google the following keywords "florida link baiting". I recently launched a site dedicated to SEO and social media optimization that is only a few months old and was seeing if I would come up, but unfortunately I did not. I was actually enlightened by this article and have learned much from it. I am actually planning to teach a beginner SEO class and may show some students a bit about digg and social media optimization. Successful marketing involves innovative campaigns and ideas and creativity is what distignuishes one marketer from another.
Congratulations Dan.
What does this say about the quality of Google as a search engine if you can write a great article about diseases and superhuman powers and it boosts the rankings of a car site.
This tells me that there is a great opportunity for a company to displace Google. They count links better than anyone else. It is time other search engines stop trying to count links better than Google and take the battle to new fronts.
Daniel, fantastic post! Such an interesting read, this is the kind of post I want to read more of!!! Well done on your Digg and Reddit success.
I think you will hit the nail on the head if you now can apply the same tactic but with relevant content to the website you are driving traffic to. I do really think that would make a difference to your search engine rankings.
As those above have said, a really interesting post. Nice to see the data, and what the results have been so far. Thanks for sharing. It'll be interesting to get an update later on, to see what the long term effects have been for you.
How long would it take me to rank in Google for the phrase "sleazy car salesman"? (it's a joke relax!) =P
I would think that a Digg for unrelated terms would have little value for ranking for competitive "keywords" yes? At least I would hope that the only relevant search engine left (Google) would be aware of this.
Is it just me or does Digg look like the cover of one of those tabloid magazines you just can't keep your eyes off when you checkout groceries?
My question is, does Google want to be reduced to this level or resist and become the future ATM and voting booth of the world?
Ender Wiggins
I think the key here is revealed when you look at what Google's doing at the moment. I've been seeing a large switcharound in a lot of results, with links seemingly being devalued and meta and content coming up in importance again. Possibly a hint towards future developments, and in the problems with people linkspamming.
Any ideas on anything else they could look at (other than links/content etc...)?
While Digg is perhaps slightly more web/tech savvy audience, which I think also directly correlates to the jump in Alexa ranking, I think you are right on with the tabloid view... sensationalized, possibly dumbed-down, easy to digest content for the mass/pop culture.
I think Google wants to figure out how to be all... why give up a section of the market if you don't have to. And with continued acquisitions, they can make sure they have a sites that dominate for the respective demographics.
"giving up this section" might actually be a great way eliminate social media from flooding the organic serps. I believe that this area still should be reserved for everyone, not just those who can play the promotional (social media) game better. But yeah, getting some quick traffic to a client site while you wait to earn organic rankings works.
Daniel,
very interesting and thanks for sharing, especially the data.
It will be interesting to see what long-term impact this brings about.
Very interesting. One of my clients is a diamond company, who I'm writing a viral piece for. Was going to try and keep completely on theme, but I'm now thinking I may try what you've done and do a complete linkbaiting piece instead.
Congratulations on the sucess Daniel. :) I'll be watching your future posts with great interest.
Daniel thank you for sharing. Your experience is an interesting read and I learned a lot from it. One thing I found interesting was how adding the Digg link to the bottom of the page led to such an increase in diggs. The common though is diggers aren't reading and you typically see the Digg button at the top of the page. SEOmoz being the exception of course.
I also found it interesting to see the connection between the social media sites. Your target was Reddit, but with the right content making one home page easily led to the home page of some other social media sites.
I want to say it's a shame you can't take advantage of the new links, but since you seem fine with it I will be too.
I assume the Alexa rank will drop back close to where it was since the page isn't linking to the rest of the site and you haven't given them a reason to revisit.
I'm surprised the page doesn't rank well for words in the title, but I suppose those words could be more competitive than the words on the page.
Please post again when you have more long term data. Given this post I imagine the long term follow up will be just as interesting.
Thanks again for posting.
It'd be more interesting to brainstorm on an idea about your target keywords (maybe including a local town name or two). I am sure there is something that can be done about it and something viral should be created. It'd be interesting how that kind of content would affect your overall local rankings (and sales).
Other than that, that was a solid report. Good job.
Very interesting post! I would like to see some discussion no what it takes to with stand being slashdotted, dugg, farked, or reddited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect Aside from going over your bandwidth (money can fix that) what kind of a box do you need to have to with stand the traffic. I am guessing if you are on a shared hosting account there is no way to go but down. I think Matt Cutts disabling his graphics last time he got slashdotted. Also is any one offering services that will get you slashdotted, dugg, farked or reddited.
It depends what software you use. My custom blog software can withstand diggs easily (without caching) on shared hosting.
Wordpress on the other hand needs a caching mechanism to have any chance at all. WP uses 16 MYSQL queries per page.
Hey everyone! As a new poster on SEOmoz, I sure am glad to have had such a positive response to my article. Readers like you guys are exactly the kind of people I would love to have coming to my blog! Unfortunately, the damn thing is down, and I'm not sure when it will be coming back up. I'm kicking myself for not spending a bit more on my hosting.
In response to bobmutch - the original article that was dugg was hosted with the same hosting plan as our site. The difference was that it had no hosted images, and was not embedded in a blog. It was simply an html file (around 20kb), with all of its outside media content coming from youTube. This setup seemed to work out fine, but as a number of you have mentioned, we certainly missed out on a great number of readers and return visitors. This was obviously a regret of ours. Over at Voltier.com, we've got a lot of great blog posts that will be coming your way, so we sincerely hope you'll come back to us and join in the discussion. Thanks again for everyone's encouragement, its a great feeling to have such positive interaction (especially after the mostly irate comments comming from the digg crowd.)
Take Care!
-Dan
Dude, you wrote that article in TEN minutes?
Yeesh, it would no doubt have taken me at least a couple of hours to come up with an idea like that and write it.
Vic
It depends, one of my wordpress blogs in the past withstood three diggs without crashing on a shared server by using the wp-cache plugin.
>>Also is any one offering services that will get you slashdotted, dugg, farked or reddited?
<sarcasam>Gosh It's on the tip of my tounge. Let me think. Rrrr, Rrrr, Raaa....Rand! Yeah, that's the guy. I think he lives in Seattle.</sarcasam>
Daniel - well done, great link bait and great post.
My only comment would be that adding adsense will hurt the sites ability to get links from other blogs.
Now that was an excellent post! Want more of that!
Experiments told in such detail really helps to understand how SE work and can give great information for all of us. Your effort to write about it is much appreciated here!
Offcourse there should be some testing made ourselves before we can truely understand what and why specifics elements happened, but it sure gives another point of view and insights.
It might be worth a look at what kind of anchortexts are used to link to the digged page. If they are not related to the article but more generic words such as "interesting read", "check this", etc. it might be a good idea to 301 that page to an important page of the real website in a few weeks time. That way your entire site can benefit some more of the backlinks.
Thanks again for an interesting read!
TFBPA- This is a great point. I have been wondering what the effect of redirecting to our main page would be. The only problem is that there is still quite a bit of traffic being generated by the digg over a week ago. Redirecting would cause two problems.
1.) Our site would be overrun with people who are not targeted to our local market, and most certainly not looking to buy a car.
2.) We would risk losing those links due to the fact that the article would no longer be what came up when people clicked.
What do other people think? Would this be a wise idea? Is it worth the experiment just to see how much more the links would be worth if they were pointing to the home page? What percentage of backlinks do you think we would lose? I'm very interested to hear some theories.
-Dan Tynski
Dan - I would also be interested in seeing if a redirect from an unrelated subject pulls any weight, how about a followup post? You might also want to try it on a "non client" site before you piss someone off and damage your rep.
There are people who already have these answers BTW who do not have time to blog or care to keep their toolboxes locked. ;)
A 301 had occurred to me as well, but something about doesn't feel right. Kind of puts the bait and switch into linkbait. Other thoughts along the same line were to rewrite the page to another topic that fits the theme of the site, but that also feels dishonest to me.
If there's a way the content could be written so it still honors why all those other sites are linking to it and somehow become more relevant to the rest of the site then you could probably link it to the rest of the site and benefit more from the new links.
Chances are if the anchor text is generic enough and you did redirect or rewrite the site would benefit. I would also think if you waited a time before doing either most of the links would stay. Still I have to say it's not exactly the most honest thing in the world to do and it's the kind of thing that makes diggers distrust SEOs.
Very Good rand, very impressed with the link bait, how you do it, I guess it takes lots of pratice, and hopefully your client is happy! I am going to start writing up more articles to catch some links, i have caught some, but not anything like that, I guess pratice makes perfect.
Great Job!
Rand didn't write this post--one of our readers did.
Daniel, a great story, thank you for sharing.
What I'm curious about - how many leads/customers has this unrelated story generated? Also, you will get more traffic from better position on SERPs in the immediate future, but isn't there a risk of being penalized on the long run for being off-topic? Looking forward to your updates.
This is a great post Dan, though you might want to blur out your Adsense CTR, revealing that is against the TOS.
we're aware of this, and we're willing to take the risk for the greater good of shared knowledge :) I hope at the very least information about the converting nature of the traffic from these types of sites will prove useful to the community.
so the new trick to Digg is making a mentos pepsi commercial and putting it on an orphan page?
Seriously though that is some really interesting stuff. Just goes to show how crazy Googles authority knob is.
Thanks for the great post Daniel! This is the type of post that gets me excited.
I found it very interesting to hear how much the article helped the rest of the site even though it was not linked to the rest of the site. That gives me some hope with some of our clients in similar situations.
Awesome post. Your client might not sell any more cars from this exercise, but you (and all your readers) have learned something important here that can be applied in other situations even more effectively where there might be a tigher nexus between the article created and the website promoted.
What struck me is your ranking improvement for your keywords. From my experience, people usually use your title as the anchor text. If so, then I dont think any auto keywords made it to the list (or be influenced).
Or maybe the site is small enough that a boost like this can make a big change?
Any one have the same experience? Would love to hear it.
I suggest Rand and Daniel Tynski brain storm and do up a follow up article on the best process to get dugg, reddited, etc., based off Daniel's experience.
am9905d: the WP-Cache 2.0 is a good tip. I am going to give that one a run. Thanks!
https://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/
Any one else have tips on with standing getting dugg?
DanielTynski: Your site is still down. Can't you get that back up?
Tyle dewiit: Er, it was Daniel (on www.voltier.com that is still down) that did it not Rand. Moooo.
I actually have a few theories about what the best processes might be to get up there on sites like digg or reddit. I seem to have some pretty clear evidence already about when the best times might be, what kind of boosts really help and when to get them, and some information about how an article goes viral on more than just one site. My brother and I have discussed how the process is somewhat like trying to start a lawnmower...with some articles sputtering, almost going viral, and then dying out. Its all very interesting, and I'd love to collaborate with Rand or someone else with experience dealing with something like this.
Ask Matt, he's made the front page of Digg 5 or 6 times in the last couple of weeks with programing articles.
Lists of things tech, science, health or politics related tend to do obscenely well.
Nice job daniel,
It is interesting how powerful these social media sites are. Congrats on being promoted from youmoz to main blog!!!
I love how many ads are on the article...