Pure coincidence, perhaps, but there were two articles in my feed reader today arguing that there’s a need to avoid too much Search Engine Optimisation.
From Dharmesh Shah:
The Perils of Pandering to Google.
And from Ken Yarmosh:
The trouble with ranking highly on Google is that any old riff-raff might turn up at your site. You could end up ranking on terms you’ve mentioned in asides or used for examples. Ken was ranking for a MySpace widget called Project Playlist that he wrote one post about — and presumably attracting a bunch of MySpace users rather than technical strategy afficionadoes. Twopointouch still ranks #1 for the term ‘myspace sex aide’, owing to a rather regrettable mistake (long story…).
Indiscriminate traffic isn’t much use to website owners, unless you’re a mass media site selling ads at a CPM. They aren’t interested in your articles, won’t comment, won’t link to your stuff. They don’t click on the ads you’re carrying, if you’ve got them, because the ads aren’t targeted towards them. By and large, they’ll turn up, take one look and scurry straight back to their search results. Waste of bandwidth.
So this could be another great use for your site logs. Any traffic report worth its salt will include what search terms people entered to get to you. If you write about dogs, and you discover that you’re getting a lot of cat-searchers, it might be time to root out that cat content, or err… sex aide content, as the case may be.
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I get by far the most traffic for a post on PS3 (I was talking about it as a media server), but its a gamer magnet. The next (by some way behind) is one on “Porn 2.0″!
I don’t know whether that’s good or bad :)
I’m not alone, then. Does it make you wish you had a PS3 blog instead? If I was looking for ad revenue, it would certainly be a temptation.
Incidentally, we’ve got an NMK event about Porn 2.0 in September — hope you’re coming along.
I’d go further and argue that indiscriminate traffic is actually worse than having no value — it has negative value.
Part of the challenge in online marketing is separating the signal from the noise. Getting a bunch of random traffic tends to hide the quality traffic and hence makes life harder.
Agreed. One of the points Ken made was that by de-optimising, he increased his average visit length and decreased bounce-backs. These figures will count for more and more as the illusory measure of page impressions ceases to carry weight.
I think it depends.….for example, the PS3 post was fairly early on in broadstuff’s existence and in that case probably pushed up the blog’s ranking early, which then improved the visibility for other stuff etc etc.
I must say though that I really don’t understand the logic of Google’s Blog Search (as in I know what its supposed to do, but it seems very random in reality) and in our case at least Technorati picks up far more of the links we get.