I noticed an interesting post on SEOmoz that in essense shows the power of Digg and Reddit in building crazy traffic overnight. The post by SEOer Daniel Tynski is here. A worthy link bait from any webmaster’s perspective.
How long would it take to get 234,000 visitors? Practically overnight?
Here’s what I observed:
- Social media sites are the modern day SEOer’s dream. Low cost and quite easily manipulated.
- You need serious writing skills. Writing a Digg worthy article in 10 minutes isn’t supposed to be a piece of cake!
- Quantity but not quality. With most of the traffic being curiosity seekers, Adsense performs extremely poor. A CTR of 0.24?
- Although gaining a chunk of backlinks, notice the search engines are still cautious, as in noting Daniel’s comment on, “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” and “no backlinks appeared on Google webmaster tools”.
- Hardly anyone made it to the main homepage of the site. I wouldn’t be surprised if 90% of the traffic fails to make a return visit as it indicates curiosity seekers.
- Would be interesting if we could also see how long the majority of visitors stayed on that page, as it seems most just went for a quick read and clicked away without browsing.
- Get WP-Cache. Comes in handy.
At this stage, it looks to me like the search engines raising their eyebrows, and what they do next is the main thing everyone wants to know.
But if I’m not mistaken, this looks similar in effect to purchasing an expired domain with high PR and putting up a non related site in place of the former.