Google Loves - A Demonstration

Henry Abbott of Gekko Blogs (and also of TrueHoop, my main source for quality NBA news) analyzes, in more detail, what we were hinting at earlier this month.

Gekko Blogs: Google Loves Blogs: A Demonstration It is not news that search engines and blogs are good friends. Even in this blog's young life, we have blogged about it before. There have been whole books and blogs written on the topic.

There is even the old joke that BLOG stands for "Better Listings On Google."

But it's interesting to see the dynamic in effect. To demonstrate it, let's take a look at the oldest and most popular Gekko Blog: TrueHoop.

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Even if you create a perfect static website, because of the ever-changing search engine algorithms and competition, you might only come up meaningfully in search engine rankings for three or four terms.

You can see here, that coming up meaningfully for three or four terms would not do much for your traffic--unless those terms happen to be super popular ones--in which case you can guarantee it will be a full-time job (hustling for in-bound links etc.) to stay high in the rankings.

But TrueHoop is reasonably high in the listings of hundreds of different terms. That's not through any special effort on our part--other than making the most interesting posts we know how about whatever is most important in the NBA on any given day.

The main reason this dynamic is underway is because this is a busy blog that covers a lot of topics. If it's important to the NBA, we've probably blogged about it at some point since the blog was founded in May. And, because we have been timely and professional, people have built links to TrueHoop from other websites and blogs, which is a strong sign to the search engines that the site is valuable.

Once the interesting content on countless timely topics, and plentiful inbound links are in place, the search engines and the competition can monkey with their formulas all they want. The truth is, a busy blog like this drives content from so many different terms that little fluctuations around the web are unlikely to impede traffic.

In essence, you can't know what terms will drive traffic, so the big prize goes to sites that are optimized for lots and lots of terms. Some of them will work.

We discuss a large number of topics at B12, which in all honesty has really only been an active site for about 18 months. Prior to spring of 2004, we only really blogged once a month or so, starting with some poor attempts at birthday poetic solipsism involving copious amounts of various inebrients in April of 2002. Since spring of 2004, we've averaged at least 3 or 4 new pages a day, sometimes more, sometimes less. I'm not sure how many unique words are currently available at B12 (if I knew how to get the entire site, including archives, into a statistical analysis software, I would), but I'm sure the dictionary count would be quite a large number. There are almost 1500 movabletype entries since November 2004, an average of 3-4 a day. We don't have the mental discipline to discuss only one or two topics, so our 'net cast' of terms is really fairly diffused. Certain search terms, like "DHL Sucks", or "George Bush's Coke Jaw" or "tinsley mortimer husband" lead here. Can't say there was any plan to become a top google hit for Tinsley Mortimer admirers/detractors, or for hundreds of visitors to leave so many poignant complaints about DHL. Just happened that way.

We don't blog for money, which is obvious since our style is rather terse, though of course, the google ads and amazon referrals do bring in a small steady amount of income (especially if you happen to click on an interesting google ad!!) which nearly makes this endeavor a break even proposition. Well, excluding time spent actually creating these multiple pages.

some traffic stats below the fold, but boils down to that about 24% of the B12 traffic doesn't come directly from a search engine. Google is by far the top search engine, especially if you include google.ca, google.uk, images.google.com, etc.