The Pull Effect conversation at Cre8asite got me thinking in-depth about where the value of Mike Grehan's idea of a search "pull" will come from and how it can help affect marketers and sites in smaller niches.
The notorious sandbox effect, for which the pull effect is often put forward as a solution, is something that's largely undocumented, though it certainly carries some common sense. The general idea is that the sandbox will prevent a site from ranking for it's completely unique name - i.e. seomoz.org ranked in the 50's for a search for "seomoz" and Bill's seobythsea.com ranked in the 60's for "SEO by the Sea" when they were sandboxed. With pull, the idea is to get hundreds or thousands of daily searches from diverse geographies for the terms in order to indicate to Google that the new site and search term are a real "phenomenon" and that boxing is a bad idea.
My personal feelings are that the only way to achieve this effect is either to spam (which would have to use some very nifty proxies, malware or a virus) or to go natural. If you spam and succeed, please do drop a line - I'd be very interested to see that work. If you go natural and actually achieve it, SEO is the last thing on your mind. With thousands of searchers typing in your brand name, you're going to be generating a lot of buzz and a lot of business, regardless of what Google does or doesn't do (although, if you're still boxed and 50,000 people can't find your site, that could really suck).
The "pull effect" strategy in SEO is something that, by and large, needs to be grown naturally and start small. However, it's an important metric to keep track of - unique brand name searches over time can certainly indicate the growth or decline of a given site's popularity and search engines are surely spending some research time looking into it.
Any other ideas of how the "Pull Effect" can be used in SEO?
Dosent work in my opinion.. Remember the infamous `private detectives` site? Thousands of people were searching that term and then skipping straight past the top 3 and clicking on no.4
I would have thought this would have a massive effect on the site and it would be a surefire no.1 because of the publicity bloop making it look more relevent than the top 3 that were ignored.
So far i believe that it `may` be a factor but it is not a factor that is worth much thought rather than a blog post like this.
I would love to be proved wrong though and somebody to show me that it does have an effect.
Yeah - I can't imagine it could ever hurt you. We'd all just go out and build spambots to search for our competitors' sites, right?
yeah, i was wondering about the search volumes. what could one get by with, once per person per day?
would a site ever be penalized or banned for fraudulent searches? heck, pontiac went out and broadcasted a big network commercial. why should a mom & pop who advertised to their customers and friends to do the same type of search? google couldn't start banning sites because of too many searches. my guess is the searches would just be discounted/ignored if found too often from the same ip.
again, where does the scale begin to tip?
thanks for letting me think out loud.
Six - I think it's an interesting idea and I'd love to see the results of some testing. I wouldn't advise repeated searches too frequently - Google should have a very good idea of what standard search volumes and patterns look like and anything out of the ordinary could certainly trip the spam bell.
Might be worth a shot, though, if you're launching something new - have people "Google" for it, rather than just going to the web address :)
hi rand, thanks for the link to the thread. it's one i find intriguing.
i am wondering about a tactic somewhere in the middle of your spam vs organic methods. for a smaller niche, what about a network of people, maybe employees, colleagues, friends, customers, and family. you could get one or two hundred people spread out with different ips to perform the repeated(not too repeated) searches over a period of time.
what would it take? i'm guessing the number of searches needed would be related to the avg number of searches there usually is on the keyword/phrase. i'm sure a bit more complicated than that, but on that line somewhere.