I’m sure you’ve no doubt heard that getting indexed and ranked well in Google is all about Pagerank and links.
While Google search engineer Matt Cutts may have confirmed that statement almost three years ago, it doesn’t mean things never change and/or that Pagerank and on page signals (aka SEO) are the only factors that matter when it comes to ranking in today’s search engines, especially Google.
It’s not all about SEO anymore. SEO is simply the process of optimizing your site to get the most benefit out of the rankings you earn via marketing and traffic development and is not necessarily required to achieve the rankings themselves. SEO is still valuable. SEO is still important. But it doesn’t run the show.
A look at what pure traffic can do
A few weeks back we launched a little site called Tweetwasters. It wasn’t a “serious effort” or anything we planned to monetize. It was a quick dip into the world of Twitter applications. But it also gave me some actual hard data back up what I had known in my gut to be true for a long while… traffic can have a direct impact on your indexing and rankings.
How can I be so sure? Because within a matter of two hours, Tweetwasters had achieved the following:
- the homepage was indexed
- while considered a misspelling, Tweetwasters ranked #1 for the term “Tweetwasters” – over my own blog, which is pretty strong
However, what really was interesting was what happened over the next two hours (so, within four hours of launch):
- the site had over 300 pages indexed
- the word Tweetwasters was no longer a “misspelling” as far as Google was concerned
Within 24 hours the site had managed to hit the Alexa “what’s hot on the web now” list, though it only remained there for an hour or two. The site’s growth and strength in Google continued get stronger:
- the site had over 600 pages indexed
- the user profile pages began ranking top ten for folks without a lot of competition for their name and top 100 for those who did
- the site was now ranking #1 for the word “tweetwasters” above many other sites discussing it, and not only my own
Nearly 48 hours after launch, TechCrunch gave us a mention and over 20,000 profiles had been checked at least once in the system. The site had over 1000 profile pages indexed and had received over 10,000 links (also proving that there is no “getting links too fast” issue PROVIDING YOU HAVE THE TRAFFIC PATTERNS TO MATCH YOUR LINK GROWTH).
Several weeks later, our fifteen minutes of fame are up and the massive traffic on the site has become a trickle.
While we still rank number one for “tweetwasters”, the amount of pages the site has indexed has dropped to less than five hundred and my profile page no longer ranks top 100 for “sugarrae” (it isn’t even indexed anymore at the moment, even with a range of site link from my sidebar – if you’re smart, you’ll take something home from that too).
What this says to me is that while you can use your looks (in this case traffic) to open doors, you need to be able to back it up with some substance (keep people engaged, keep them coming back, keep them passing along your links) if you expect to last.
This has long been apparent to me when sites with some of the most horrid architecture and on page SEO I’ve ever seen, like Perez, are able to rank and rank well for highly competitive core terms. Watching Tweetwasters go from zero to sixty in terms of both traffic and the search engines simply allowed us to document an extreme case from beginning to end.
Could a talented SEO double the traffic Perez Hilton receives? They sure could – easily. But the lack of a competent SEO has not stopped their “SEO ignorant” marketing machine from obtaining rankings for all of their core terms.
Learn to major in marketing and minor in SEO
Three years ago, I did a post at WebmasterWorld on how I saw the tides changing:
“Stop aiming for the engines and aim for real, live human beings. Aim for obtaining traffic and not backlinks. Aim for obtaining attention and not pagerank. Stop aiming for the affections of a mathematical computation and aim for commendations from breathing individuals.”
Good core marketing and the occasional yet regular viral success (it doesn’t need to be large scale, especially if your industry isn’t) – both of which amount to driving traffic at the end of the day – can get you good rankings with or without SEO.
Mimicking valuable links with bullshit links obtained merely to game the engines won’t have a lasting effect. My nofollowed link from Twitter is more valuable to me than my dofollow link from TechCrunch because it sends me traffic on a regular basis that sends the right signals to Google while bringing actual human beings to my site.
SEO simply helps you leverage them to their fullest potential. SEO is no longer the sole key to good search engine rankings. Adapt and survive or deny and die. Remain a small component of an online marketing campaign or learn to run one. It’s your choice. 2009 will be the year of sharing tactics to market and brand websites from blogs to affiliate sites to regular business websites here at Sugarrae.
Subscribe to the Sugarrae feed | Follow Sugarrae on Twitter
Related Posts
Sugarrae runs on the Thesis WordPress Theme
If you’re someone who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality that you wouldn’t be able to obtain otherwise with a simple control panel instead of having to alter code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.
For those "in between", like myself, I’ve created "dummy" guides for Thesis hooks that allow us to make more professional customizations than we ever deemed possible. The theme is not only highly customizable, but it has allowed me to run Sugarrae more professionally, with a much more targeted focus on monetization than it ever has been able to achieve before. You can find out more about Thesis below:
{ 70 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting post, thanks. As a ppc evangelist, the immediate traffic we achieve, is also sustainable long term, albeit at a price, and of coarse we measure ROI.
It is certainly tempting to go after these kind of flash in the pan effects, the free traffic… hmm
Hi Rae,
You may soon have to adjust your slogan then : “never mess with a woman who can …”
Great blog though ! re. seo while i strongly believe there is still a need for long term organic seo with perhaps less focus on pure rankings and more on analytics, traffic and conversions, larger companies may still go the PPC route to try and deliver short term results.
Yep, you are so right. Seo is only a must for websites. But it isn’t be your first aim. If you make only seo things, you will be first in any keyword you want. But if you haven t got good content, visitors come to your website and go directly. They won t stay in your website. The importance thing is too keep them as returning visitors.
Thanks
Thank you! I have been scratching my head about the value of nofollow links. I knew that they had an impact on my web sites but I couldn’t explain how. You finally made it clear for me. There is a correlation between Ranking high in Search Engines and Traffic. Which makes sense because Google claims that they are trying to democratize the web. Thus, as much as inbound links are “votes”, mass traffic should and does make sense as “votes” as well. If a website receives a lot of traffic, it is bound to be meaningful, thus climbing the ranks of Google.
This is great advice, especially about valuing real people instead of an algorithm.
Thanks for posting this.
Interesting post!
Forgive me if I miss the mark here (or overlooked a supporting detail in the post) because I’m a bit tired from a long week, but I think it’s a little bit dangerous to at least implicitly suggest that traffic is what got the site indexed.
I’m fairly sure that it was inbound links that did the trick (even if you couldn’t see them using a link command).
@Hugo if one link from my blog was enough to index 300 pages of a two hour old website, I’d make a lot more money from this blog than I actually do. Additionally, the drop in traffic also correlates with a drop in rankings and indexing… the links didn’t disappear and only become more numerous as they get found.
I’ve seen the effect on a constant basis and have been testing it a long time. Tweetwasters is simply the extreme example that makes it obvious and an example I’m willing to share.
Hate to just nod my head in agreement. Good post not only because you’re 100% on-message but also because you got the numbers to back up every word.
I agree with Rae. If the ranking of Tweetwasters was due primarily to links, it wouldn’t fall at a rate that corresponds to the traffic fall-off. The number of links tends to increase the longer a site is up, which would lead one to believe that ranking would increase or stay constant if traffic didn’t play some role.
It has been a long held misconception (in my opinion) that traffic doesn’t impact ranking. Links certainly do play a large part in whether or not a page maintains a strong rank over the long term, but for a page to rank very highly so quickly after launch the traffic has to play a part.
Your example is a very good one. It helps give more incite for those who have read over Google and how their alogrithms work, but never seen in work or have not understood it fully. For some, they think Google is slow. However, as you have proved, like a business, websites can function similarly. For some just realizing these techniques, it may possibly mean going back to the basic storyboard.
“It takes a bit of leverage and marketing to make a business happen.” paraphrasing from a book that Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki once put together.
Great post, one of those that I will definitely bookmark and refer to later on for inspiration when I need it most.
This just goes to show that we really don’t need to be overly concerned about whether or not a link is a “nofollow” link or not.
I also think all of this is in line with where Google is going as a whole, which is to look more towards personalization and what people really want to see in the search results, not just “links”.
Hi, thanks for that, great post.
I’m not disagreeing in any way, but have you noticed that when posting new content, it seems to rank quite well immediately, and then, depending perhaps on the number of clicks….or….whatever, it then falls gradually.
Might that be one influence out of the 200 factors I hear are taken into account
Thanks again
Matt
This post makes some important points that people had better start paying attention to.
Tweaking your on-page SEO and then looking to build links doesn’t quite cut it anymore. Over time, it’s going to be even less valuable as search engines rely less on these noisy signals and more on traffic and user behavior data available through multiple sources (especially in Google’s case). With Tweetwasters as the example, we might even call this old methodology “backwards.”
Nice post – and thanks for sharing. There is alot to get into there, but my overall on it is, that FreshBot still lives and still rules the day. “News” and fresh content are still giving that 24-48 hour sliding scale boost of rankings. Even if your traffic had been maintained independently for weeks, the rankings would have started falling at the 48-72 hour mark. You can set your watch by it.
Hey Brett… don’t get me wrong, I definitely believe in freshbot… but traffic is seperate, though in *most* cases, they’d likely occur at the same time, especially on a blog (a new post is likely to receive a lot of traffic if you have wide reach).
But we’ve also been experiencing this on static sites where the pages are old… but a new surge of traffic causes them a boost while the traffic remains… they drop afterwards, tho usually retain at least a very small portion of a boost.
Just to be clear about my point (and to concur with Brett and Rae in a sense) I’m not contesting that traffic is having an impact on ranking. I’m only stipulating that in order for the initial index to occur, a backlink(s) was needed.
I encountered a similar situation years ago, when my colleague and I launched freehowardstern.com in response to his being pulled off the airwaves. Traffic definitely seem to have an immediate impact on natural search, but the initial index (the catalyst if you will) was freshbot IMHO.
Rae is right on this one. We had the same thing happen with votelicio.us when we launched it. It got picked up as the site of the week across a bunch of ABC network affiliate sites after a day or so of being up and ranked for hundreds of keywords (with hundreds of separate pages indexed instantly) in the first couple days. Traffic levels were high and the rankings continued until the SOTW mentions got lost in the archives. After that the number of pages indexed dropped to just a few and traffic died off. Now it primarily drives traffic through image search – mainly for pervs looking for naked pictures of Jennifer Aniston.
Hi, Rae:
I remember reading not too long ago on the Matt Cutt’s blog that from two results with everything else being equal (as far rank and SEO), the site that gets the more clicks will rank higher in SERP.
So even if my site is a PR3 and my comp is a PR1 it doesn’t automatically mean my site will rank higher. If the PR1 site and its accompanying result gets more clicks (in other words is more appealing) it will outrank mine.
As far as de-indexing after traffic dies down from a new blog, i was not aware of this. And don’t fully understand why this would happen. Or am i simply misunderstanding that it doesn’t get indexed, but loses prominence in result.
Great article.
Tweetwasters is a pretty cool app. You should sell it on Sitepoint if you’re done with it. I see Twitter apps going for a good chunk now. (ie $3,000 – $6,000)
Missy.
@Missy well, CTR (click thru rate) is different than the type of traffic I’m referring to. That would be a separate factor.
>>>As far as de-indexing after traffic dies down from a new blog, i was not aware of this. And don’t fully understand why this would happen.
As the site loses traffic, it appears to lose deemed “importance” (when looking at it having importance solely as a result of traffic) and therefore Google doesn’t seem to find it as important to crawl. And yes, pages that are indexed appear to lose prominence as traffic dies down.
Kevin, never underestimate the power of pervs looking for naked pictures of Jennifer Aniston…
A great point of view. Actually I couldn’t say that traffic replaces SEO, but social media marketing continuously and well done could do it. Because actually this is what brings traffic.
It’s also this strategy as for as I understood, Google will use more and more… Look at the amount of visitors, how long they stay and the amount of page they visit.
I believe it’s about the quality of your visitors and not only the quantity.
Good article!
Excellent article. Thanks.
Wonder if you might update your 2006 webmasterworld article? How to reach the living, breathing people…unless not much has changed since then. Saw your promo trailers article, that was good too. Like those angles on building audience, links, rank, etc.
Hi Rae,
Can you tell me if you use “Google Analytics”, because google put a huge importance on bounce rates…
So maybe it explain why the number of indexed page dropped …
Interesting take on things, but I do disagree with some of the points. Getting ranked well in Google is not entirely about PageRank and Links. PageRank is all but a dead metric that is used, and has very little effect on the overall ranking of a page. Links, sure will impact the ranking, but it has to be relevant links, from trusted sites with relevant content. I just blogged about this as “Link Reputation”, and discussed this concept in detail.
The fact that you had a site indexed relatively quickly proves very little. You were also ranked #1 for a term that no one else would probably be even searching for. That’s not much of an accomplishment.
Alexa is also a metric that anyone serious in SEO would discount.
You are so off the mark in many of your comments and illustrations. It amazes me when I read this sort of misinformation.
Barry… first off… you take a brand new domain and get 300 pages of it indexed within four hours of taking off the robots.txt… GO!
Yeah, didn’t think so.
Secondly, I didn’t say Google was entirely about pagerank or links – my point actually was that it was NOT. I also never cited Alexa as a METRIC. I cited that we made Alexa’s top “what’s hot now” list which meant we got a link from the Alexa homepage for a few hours, since you appear to be confused.
What amazes me is when I see reading comprehension as poor as yours being used to insult someone and counter an imaginary point no one ever made. However, considering it is 2009 and the most recent post on your blog debates whether or not the “Google Sandbox” can “be avoided”, I guess I’m not surprised.
But thanks for commenting. :)
Barry you just got owned by Rae lol :P If it was an attempt to gain attention though you got it…I am sure lots of readers will click on your name to see your website especially since Rae responded to your comment :)
On to the subject now…
Seo is still very important and will always be useful to make a site more visible to the engines and improve the results to the serps for certain target keywords….
What is Rae saying here if i get it is that if you have a good fresh content,if you post on your blog regularly and if you can manage the social media well then you will have a good traffic and good rankings for your blog eventually…To be able to say that you are successful of course you will need to have a pretty good conversion rate as well :)
And for the record… I never said SEO wasn’t important. I actually stated the exact opposite. I’m saying that SEO is not required to rank in Google. There is a big difference between those two statements. :)
I get it really depends on how one views what SEO is. It is such a big term, in that a whole lot goes into it.
Do i view link building as an SEO component? Yes. Do i view rank (and all that encompasses) as an SEO thing? Yes.
But there is so much to SEO. It is an ocean of activity. You know. (i hope i’m making sense) lol.
It goes deep and wide and i’m not there yet with all the myriad nuances of SEO. But hey that is what makes it so fascinating and interesting.
P.S. Why isn’t my profile thingy not working? Will have to look into this.
Rae, my reading comprehension is fine. The point you’ve illustrated has nothing to do with SEO, but has more to do with the evolution of and power of the search engines to index pages. Gone are the days of having to wait days, weeks and months to get a site indexed.
I’m sorry that you took this as an attack, but it was not meant that way. My point was that it’s not difficult to rank for uncommon terms such as “TweetWasters”. This type of information leaves many new entrants into SEO thinking that they can see such results quickly, without much an effort is misleading, especially for anyone who is trying to learn and/or make changes in their overall ranking.
You do make some very valid points with respect to marketing and the requirement to have a well rounded approach to sustain traffic. People have to realize that there is more than SEO that can help an organization & business achieve online success.
Again, I do apologize if my comments appeared as an attack.
As for my writing & articles, I do not profess anywhere to be an SEO expert, but what I do is write about what my understanding is on the chosen topic, whether gained from reading or researching, and generally in response to questions that I’ve been asked. Thanks for stopping by my site and again, I do apologize.
Heeh, apparently barry doesn’t think a fast index speed is very important, given that all of his domains in his about page have serious canonical issues, but hey, he’s l33t..
That was a great post that you did over at wmw, i often refer back to it, about as much as brett’s successful site in 12 months.. and wish you would stop by more often..
>>>but has more to do with the evolution of and power of the search engines to index pages
No, it doesn’t. If you put up a 300 page site tomorrow, Google will not grab 300 pages of it within four hours or twenty four or forty eight for that matter. I know. I put up sites regularly. The faster we get them traffic or links, the faster they get indexed.
>>>I’m sorry that you took this as an attack, but it was not meant that way
When you say I’m spouting misinformation, it’s an attack.
When you imply I’m not a decent SEO because you believe I am using Alexa data as a metric, when I was NOT, is to me, a sign that you did not comprehend what I wrote.
>>>My point was that it’s not difficult to rank for uncommon terms such as “TweetWastersâ€.
That was not your point, but let’s pretend it was. Do you GET that Google went from considering it not a word to a word in less than a day? Do you realize that much stronger sites, like my own and Digg and TechCrunch had pages dedicated to the word, but didn’t rank above the core domain after 30 minutes (Sugarrae ranked #1 for the first 30 minutes). Anyone who has been doing SEO for any length of time knows that typically, if you have a brand new site and a page of yours gets submitted to Digg, you won’t outrank Digg even if you search for the entire title.
>>>You do make some very valid points with respect to marketing and the requirement to have a well rounded approach to sustain traffic.
What I write about on Sugarrae is not my “understanding” of a topic, but rather my experience with a topic across a wide range of sites. So, if you’re going to shout that I am spreading misinformation, you’d damn sure better bring something to back it up aside from clinging to “Tweetwasters” not being a competitive term and missing every other REAL point in the post.
Understanding and research isn’t going to make me question experience and testing.
I don’t want to fight your experience, but this has the implication that google can see traffic it isn’t sending – aka that it is using google analytics to drive search results (and would punish sites not using either adsense or google analytics).
Can’t the same thing be explained with something far simpler: old fashioned ‘new site gets a boost’ syndrome? Especially for the domain name itself? Helped by all those viral links?
Your 3rd paragraph is encouraging, maybe we’ve come full circle and are getting back to the importance of providing what our customers want and not what the SEs want.
“It’s not all about SEO anymore. SEO is simply the process of optimizing your site to get the most benefit out of the rankings you earn via marketing and traffic development and is not necessarily required to achieve the rankings themselves. SEO is still valuable. SEO is still important. But it doesn’t run the show.”
Rae, thanks for sharing the figures. Quite interesting to see both the indexing speed and the drops once the traffic avalanche went away.
Katinka, I have no issues discussing and disagreeing on the topic LOL, no worries.
>>>aka that it is using google analytics to drive search results (and would punish sites not using either adsense or google analytics)
No, at no point is this what this means… you’re missing something… the toolbar. Pretend analytics and adsense don’t even exist for a second – they have a toolbar installed on an extremely large portion of the Google surfing population (which, due to their market share, means a large portion of the surfing population in general).
Testing several years ago showed at least 1/4 of Google users had a toolbar installed – and I’d be willing to bet a lot that the % is much higher now. Stop and think about just how much data that is for a second. They don’t need analytics or adsense to make a fairly educated guess as to the traffic a site receives.
You’ve more than verified (in my mind) what I’ve believed for a couple of years now – even though people have told me I was wrong: traffic directly influences how valuable Google deems a site. While not as dramatic as your example, I had a site a couple years back experience something similar. Thanks for sharing this.
I’ve believed for some time that traffic matters for ranking, and it makes sense. Google is concerned about search value. The introduction of using backlinks as votes (a Google idea) was based on that premise. The rise of social bookmarking sites has given them another measure of value and new sources of traffic to analyze. I do have some questions for future inputs:
1) Any idea what your bounce rate was? If you had a low bounce rate then that could have been a factor in rankings and indexing.
2) Can you verify any RSS subscriptions? That might also have an affect on indexing and ranking, though a rapid loss of rank after traffic decline would indicate that perhaps subscriptions didn’t help.
3) Also, the sources of your traffic might be a factor as well. Did you test that? I mean, 10,000 visitors from anywhere and everywhere wouldn’t be equal to 10,000 visitors from a highly authoritative site like Digg or TechCrunch.
Fantastic Post! Anything else I said would lessen it. Great Job!
Awesome post Rae. Lots to think about.
Question: Do you think Google discounts traffic from the Digg home page? Most of us (including me) have refused to bother with Digg anymore because of the hassle and the general worthlessness of the traffic, but wouldn’t your conclusion say we should all go back to trying to hit it?
Allen Taylor – I like the way you think and I’m right there with you :)
1. The bounce rate of the site ALL TIME is 30.81% as of this moment. The average time on site was 1 minute and 20 seconds with an average of 2.62 page views per visit.
2. We did not have the ability to subscribe to anything, however, I agree that if we DID and we got a lot of RSS subs (or none) it can also be an indicator they might use as well (if not now, in the future).
3. We did not get the techcrunch mention until TWO DAYS after launch – all of the stuff I listed above happened on the first day. I think traffic from Digg isn’t as “authoritative” as one might think.
Search engines were less than 2% of our traffic and the traffic that DID come in was based on people searching FOR us (tweetwasters, tweet wasters, etc)… it was well into the hundreds. 35% of our traffic was direct with no referrer and TechCrunch didn’t send anywhere near as much traffic as one might think – in the low thousands (though it was posted on a Sunday).
@Brian re Digg… I think traffic is a large factor, but I think it is still a “factor”. If I’m Google, and it’s possible, I might be looking at other data to “qualify” the traffic coming to a site.
For instance, if you get 10,000 visits in 20 minutes, with 20 new RSS subscribers, a bounce rate of 95.4% and an average time on site of 8 seconds – that might not be traffic I’d take seriously.
If you get 10,000 visits, 250 RSS subscribers, a bounce rate of 74% and an average time on site of 45 seconds, then that might be traffic to take a bit more seriously.
When you own the largest feed tracking service, one of the largest feed readers, one of the largest analytics companies and have a toolbar installed on a large portion of the surfing population, I’d guess this data wouldn’t be too hard to compile. A “conversion” isn’t always a “sale”.
I’d go after Digg traffic if my demographic was the same as Diggs. If my site is a credit card site, I don’t think I’d be bothering anymore at this point. But that’s me. :)
Great post. This is one of the best articles I have read that proves that traffic, or user behavior have a big impact on rankings. Thanks for sharing this information
Interesting post.. This proves how imp. viral marketing is..
Everyone who runs after seo for traffic may think twice now ;)
OK Rae, I have sent Perez an email referring him to your post suggesting he talk to you about how he could easily double his traffic. Hmm, was that a bit of targeted linkbait!
This was a fantastic post. I found out about it over at Search Engine Watch. As a professional SEO, I have already seen this phenomenon that you are describing, and I expect it to continue. SEOing your site will never hurt you, but it certainly won’t help you like it did in the past. Thanks for the wake-up call!
Sugarrae:
Loved this post and I totally agree. Some who thinks as a promoter and a marketer will probably fair better in the near future in this industry than someone who prioritizes SEO exclusively. If you are not someone that can adapt to change or actually just thrive on it, you’ll be reclining in someone’s couch at the tune of $350/hr pretty soon…
Take care
Peter Norvig of Google confirmed that Google does in-fact use traffic to determine newsworthiness. I believe this is the phenomenon that you were witnessing. This provides a temporary boost, but will start to fade until more long term SEO factors are taken into account.
I really liked the hour by hour timeline of events!
BTW, how long do I have to wait for my ugly mug to be added to my posts?
WOW- Rae! What a fantastic post. I agree 100% with everything that you just said. Marketing should be on the forefront of anyone who wants to rank. Especially when the term is competitive. Of course long tail keyword phrases are easier to rank but even those require a variety of places to get links from.
Thanks so much for sharing your experience with Tweetwasters with us. That was really valuable to understand. That tells me that Google is always looking to give the latest most relevant news.
Blessings to you,
Eren Mckay
Some good points, but the article isn’t worded properly. You captured online buzz. Try that in something that has no ‘buzz’ like finance.
Bullshit tech blog… buzz can be found in any industry – just takes extra work to create it in the more boring ones. I know – I play in finance.
Which bit is bullshit? The title of the page or the fact buzz will make you rank in Google?
Social is good, but search is better I should have added that. DIGG is not that good for gaining tons of backlinks in harsh wild west type industries like Finance. Google ‘car insurance’ – dominated by uk companies all with aggressive seo.
The part that is bullshit is that you claiming that you can’t get buzz in finance industries. I’m in finance. I use buzz to generate traffic and links and ranks in finance.
>>>DIGG is not that good for gaining tons of backlinks
Did I say Digg was where you should be if you want buzz in finance? If social media/buzz means Digg to you, then maybe you should expand your horizons a bit. I actually specifically said in comments above I would NOT use Digg for a credit card site (you know, finance):
Buzz/traffic/social media and Digg are not the same word.
good post. I have to agree with some of the other comments like those by Matt Lambert and Indianapolis SEO – you were definitely hitting temporal factors of the ranking function which is great for short term growth but in the long run the temporal rank will die off and you will need other factors like inlinks and pagerank (i said like these, not exactly these – just think non-temporal long-term) to have a sustainable position in the serps.
I thought it was interesting that you said the number of pages indexed actually decreased after a few days. Why would Google remove otherwise good pages from their index unless they 404, are duplicates, or appear to be spam?
Rae,
I absolutely love your no-nonsense approach to getting found in search engines. When you write to a person who is interested in what you have to say you make friends on the internet, and when you write to an algorithm you lose that connection and visitors. I feel your experiment with twitter and your contribution to the community.
Keep up the good work.
Lee Rodrigues
Technology Dojo
Don’t you think that your site beeing new had a lot to do with this? When there is a news item or short hype people are going to search for recent items. This could explain the fast indexing and ranking. To really test your theorie you should take an older website and create a lot of traffic. I’m interested if you got the same results over a longer period…
I think the name helped quite a bit. Anything with “tweet” or somehow related to Twitter is bound to get some traffic after it’s indexed. But at any rate good points about SEO not being the only factor involved.
First of all, your domain name makes a lot of difference. I would expect tweetwasters.com to rank above your blog for the term, especially as you blog has links to Tweetwasters, which tells Google that your blog is not the actual Tweetwasters website.
Also, you don’t have much competition on the term in Google. And what competition you do have will probably be pointing to Tweetwasters.com.
Change the name of the site to poker, then write another post regarding your experience with SEO.
Chris, thanks for completing missing the point and making comments that show you skimmed and not read the post. You must have “detail oriented” in bold on your resume. Considering my experience in SEO comes from the diet pill, telecom and finance sectors, I think I’ll stick with my opinion regardless of your success with ranking for amazingly competitive “web design city name” and being able to glaze over blog posts. Cheers. :)
I read your post but I do not agree 100%. Without little effort and initial investments for SEO we cant get starting traffic. I agree that after we have good traffic we will get natural links and also good rankings but to start a new site I think we need some time and Investment on money to run a successful website.
Still Page Rank holds at least 50% value in ranking on result page. If we leave some web sites that have very unique content or services, most of the web sites in the world need SEO.
Most of the web sites in the world are not owned by people who know very well about search engine, the are owned by individuals and some of those are even not aware of the basic of computers so they need a service that can optimize their web site for them to get traffic.
This shows the power of twitter, and what it can do for you and your website! We Should all learn something from this.
“while considered a misspelling, Tweetwasters ranked #1 for the term “Tweetwasters” – over my own blog, which is pretty strong” – WOW! Isn’t this like example.com ranks #1 for “example” in google?! What’s so special about that. A 100% keyword domain will have a huge advantage when it comes to ranking for it’s name.
Also, I don’t really agree with the post. While the message is interesting, it is an exception. Do that with 5 sites, using a SYSTEM and you can say it is repeatable. Expand the SYSTEM to a point where it makes money and you can say you did something. Otherwise it’s just wasted bandwidth.
Your site was “buzz”. By definition (my definition) “buzz” means big fire that consumes itself fast. You got it at one point however – you can use a “technique” like this to get huge traffic, but you MUST have a way to convert it or keep it.
And your assumption that SEO means just on-site SEO is just wrong. That helps outrank a competitor that hasn’t done his homework but it won’t help you get near him. SEO is about RELEVANCE. That’s the quality factor in a 2-variable algorithm. The 2nd variable being of a quantitative nature – LINKS.
Just like you suggest, you don’t need SEO to rank well in Google. However, as you detailed in your case study, such ranking (based solely on high traffic) will only be temporary. In all reality, you do need solid SEO to fall back on in a long run, no matter your industry / competitiveness.
How do you think it would have panned out if you hadn’t gotten a mention on Techcrunch? That is a very weighty source in search engines eyes and the content there is duplicated across the web through trackbacks. Twitter is your main source of users because Tweetwaster is a Twitter app. The nofollow link from there is your main source of users because Tweetwaster is a Twitter app it only makes sense. Twitter is also a newly trusted source by Google as it’s very interested in doing real time searching so it’s no surprise that a Twitter app would be picked up quick. If it wasn’t connected to an already popular source of users I’m not sure you would have had such a success and it’s only anecdotal evidence that SEO isn’t required to rank in Google.
Well Barrett, if you read the post, considering we didn’t get the Techcrunch mention until day 2 and all the indexings and rankings starting coming in early on day one, I’m going to say Techcrunch wasn’t the deciding factor.
Rae, this is very interesting, and I also always believed and managed to “prove” to myself this is true. I believe bounce rates and CTR also have a major impact.
Btw, you mention launching the site – but how did you drive traffic to it initially?
Great article – and a point I agree with completely – marketing and authority will win the race long after seo tactics have proved outdated. Good work.
First of all… very nice article… second of all: i want to share my thoughts about the subject:
- twitter is a system that works realtime… since google is more and more focussing on realtime items it is not strange that your site got crawled easily and got ranked so high within a couple of hours.
Do not forget that if you create a twitter-project you get a lot of links from other projects as well since the source is almost always showing the source of the tweet… after a couple of weeks, when most visitors stopped following/using the project, the bots will not find the links that easily to respective pages and may wipe them out of the index again. (the downside of realtime search you might say).
- SEO is in my opinion a long-term strategy and must come with good content in order to get to the top rankings for a long time (especially pages where realtime search is not needed ex wikipedia articles) . Also: It is always better to have a well enough optimized website with good content then having good content only.