Alex Pooley's Blog

Site Relaunch

In my last post I mentioned that Google had turned off the traffic flow to my site via their search engine. Well, I’ve done some tinkering and my 200,000 page site is now a massive 3.3 MILLION pages! Kapow!

The first incarnation of the site relied on Google navigating the site via Sitemaps. Each page on the site was a hanging node, and the only way to move between pages was to perform a search with a form post. I suspect that Google recently changed some policy regarding sitemaps, and so they stopped acknowledging pages in the sitemap. But I’m only guessing, I really have no idea. Either way, I’ve dramatically improved navigation around the site with standard links, and will keep an eye on the stats to see if my traffic grows.

Google Video Ads

Anyway, while plastering ads on my site I ended up stumbling across Google’s video with ads. Ooh la la, these things are nice! When setting up an ad, Google offer various sizes and colour themes. Smaller sizes provide video thumbnails that expand in to a player when clicked, and larger sized ads include a player with embedded thumbnails. Here’s a screen shot of a ’skinny’ ad I’ve placed on my site…

As you can see, the ad unit makes a nice addition to an otherwise dull page. Unfortunately, clicking on a thumbnail opens the player, which expands the ad unit size, which makes it harder to integrate with page layout. The next screenshot shows you what happens if you click on a thumbnail - note the horizontal page scroll!

On my site I have a search page. Due to the nature of a search page, there isn’t really much else to display other than search results. So what I’ve done is included a large ad unit on this page to soak up the remaining real estate.

Technical Junk

In case you’re interested, the new site runs on Ruby On Rails. The previous version of the site was simply a huge set of static web pages that were simply pre-processed and placed on shared hosting at Dreamhost. I originally pre-rendered the site because the complexity of the site is in cobbling all the data together, and I “just” wanted an easy way to render the data. I found the pre-processing approach was way too inflexible for updating the site, despite it’s clear deployment benefits.

In Summary…

I’m not sure if any of these updates will actually result in increased traffic flow. Surely with 3.3 million pages Google will simply have no choice but to send traffic my way. I’m going to sit on this for a bit to see what happens, then I may try my hand at a press release.

This site actually goes against guidelines 3 and 4 that I set out in my last post.

Perhaps I will prove myself wrong. We will see…

Because of their dominance in the search engine business, generating traffic through Google is often a critical part of any SEO effort. Unfortunately, traffic from Google to your web site can make or break your efforts in building an information based web site. Recently, Google turned the steady stream of traffic to one of my sites to a mere drip. This site in particular was left for 13 months as a control. In other words, I put the site online and didn’t touch it or explicitly build links for 13 months. A couple of weeks ago, without any apparent reason, traffic dropped from over a 100 unique visits per day to single digit figures.

This real life experience has highlighted the fickle nature of search traffic. Here’s another graph of the site, from inception to June 17 2008.

When the site hit its stride earlier this year, it was generating over 330 unique visitors per day from Google.

Fortunately I don’t depend on that site to pay the bills.

So what’s the deal? How did the site go from zero to hero, and back to worthless in the span of a year? The truth is that I don’t really care. The fact that anyone or anything (Google, backlinkers, malicious SEO dude), can affect my traffic flow so dramatically, leads me to question the long term viability of the long tail business model.

An important attribute of this particular site is that it did not offer a very strong point of difference, and so it was not very sticky or viral. It supplied a great breadth of basic information, and was very dependent on search engine traffic. Hence, this site existed purely to exploit the long tail.

So here’s the deal. With virtually no marketing effort I was able to take a large (200,000+ pages) generic content site and build it to over 330 unique visits per day with virtually no marketing effort. After a year, the site came round trip and found itself where it started - at single digit hits per day.

My conclusion:

1. Don’t build a long term business around search engine traffic.
2. Do use search engines to test the human interest in your site. As opposed to bot interest.
3. Ensure diversity is built in to the marketing and sales plan.

Is it coincidence that about a month ago Google had dramatically reduced my Adsense income? It’s totally irrelevant whether my trouble with Google is local to my site, or global to Google. Human behaviour has stayed consistent (so I’m led to believe) for thousands of years, while artificial intelligence is always evolving. From today forward, I’ll be targeting human behaviours, and taking the search engines as just another marketing strategy, and never my primary marketing strategy.

My conclusion, and previous experience, leads me to build this rough check list of “things to do” for my next site:

1. Build a site with something of human interest.
2. Build a subscription base with feeds, mailing lists, bookmarks.
3. Organise private advertisements.
4. Build a marketing strategy without organic search as a primary traffic driver.