Publishers and bloggers who have had the experience of having their content “Dugg”, “Scaped”, or featured prominently on any other social news or bookmarking sites have seen the short traffic spikes that tend to occur from this experience. Many have commented that beyond those huge traffic spikes there isn’t much long term value from having your content featured, and why submit to them at all if your content isn’t going to make the front page when the traffic spike occurs?
A recent experience with organic search results and some research has caused me to believe that the long term value proposition is changing and will get even better. It also sheds some light on which social sites may grow in traffic, and which of the three major search engines indexes them the best.
The Initial Query
My parents have an ecommerce site primarily selling an ergonomic stool called the Swopper Chair. I provide some technical consulting for them and I needed to look up some PHP shopping carts. So I did a Google search for “best php shopping cart”.
I started reading through the results, and noticed the result from Digg half way down. Knowing what Digg is, I figured it’d be a good recommendation and probably have some comments and additional links that might help me out. I read through the comments and ended up clicking through to both the Dugg URL and some of the URLs in the comments.
This made me wonder if there is potential for organic search results for social news and bookmarking sites to drive long tail traffic to your site, maybe even if your article never got many votes and never made the front page of the site.
The Tests
It was time to start picking some search queries and see what kind of results appear from social sites and what about those sites makes that happen. I’ll link to the query along with what social sites have results and where the original article ends up in the results.
Test 1: john battelle keynote
This was a search term from the post I made from John Battelle’s keynote at the Blog Business Summit last week that did not get many votes on the social sites, and got a few links to my post from the blogosphere.
- 5th – Netscape
- 7th – Digg
- 11th – ConversionRater (my post)
The result of that is if I hadn’t submitted my article to Netscape and Digg I’d have no chance of getting any visitors who didn’t pass the first results page. Of course, the visitor has to click through Netscape/Digg to get to my actual article, but the chances of that are decent based on how those sites are structured.
- 3rd – ConversionRater
No results from the social sites. Either Yahoo doesn’t index them well, or index them quick enough.
- 10th – ConversionRater
- 13th – Netscape
Interesting that Digg was not here at all when Netscape was listed.
Summary: Google provided the best and the most beneficial results for using social news to get higher rankings for an article than I could get on my own without submitting it.
Test 2: yahoo invests
This term is from the title of a more popular article than our first test. This one is from SmartMoney.com to the tune of 137 Diggs that was on the Business and Finance front section on Digg, and I also made a blog post with the same phrase in the title.
- 3rd – Digg
- 5th – Searchmob (A Digg like site from John Battelle about the search industry)
- 6th – SmartMoney.com Article (Actual article that was Dugg)
- 7th – ConversionRater blog post
Solid results, and the presence of social sites and linking between them and my blog post allowed this one story to take 7 of the top 10 search results, even though Yahoo has invested in many, many things over the years. This provides a lesson that sites like Digg hold a huge page rank and authority now that it ranks higher than most media outlet sites that have reported on Yahoo investing in various things.
- 17th – ConversionRater blog post
- 21st – SearchMob
- 23rd – DuggMirror (site that mirrors popular articles on Digg)
So where the heck is Digg? They haven’t been on either test so far. Does Yahoo not index Digg? Now that Searchmob has shown up on two engines, maybe it’s an important site to add to the submission mix even though it’s not as well known as others. This is the only story I’ve ever submitted there, so that looks promising. Yahoo also had much more varying results instead of just the Right Media investment story, so perhaps Google’s top results are more time-sensitive.
- 2nd – ConversionRater blog post
- 11th – SmartMoney.com article that was Dugg heavily
- 17th – Digg
- 19th – SearchMob
Live Search likes my blog the best which is great, but also interesting to see SearchMob popping up again in the top 20.
Summary: Google’s results make Digg and Searchmob look especially important to get higher rankings. It doesn’t look like social sites matter to Yahoo, and MSN results are mixed.
Test 3: toyota logo
A few weeks ago my friend Mike Rundle had a little run in with Toyota based on a company working for them taking the 9rules leaf logo and barely changing it for a site they were running. I figured this search query might be a bit harder to rank high on, so it’d be interesting to see if the social networks helped out.
- 6th – BusinessLogs.com original post
- 10th – Digg
- 11th – Netscape
- 20th – Reddit
Not bad, but the social sites might not help all that much as the original post would probably get clicked on more. It is interesting to see our first sighting of Reddit.
Yahoo Search: No results
Ugh, Yahoo hates social sites and blogs!
- 4th – Digg
- 8th – BusinessLogs Original Post
The Digg listing is a big help here at potentially getting more search traffic.
Summary of Tests
Even though it was a pretty quick test, and the search terms I tested aren’t that competitive, it’s clear that submitting your site to the social news services can help drive more traffic to your site through organic search.
I think we can also see that Google seems to embrace fresh content and the social news sites more than Yahoo and MSN, and Yahoo definitely isn’t a big fan. This is probably not a big deal as most publishers are primarily concerned with Google traffic anyway.
What does this tell us about the social sites?
Digg and Netscape were definitely the most commonly found sites, and I ran some more additional quick tests and found that Netscape seems to also show up ahead of Digg in many cases. I had an extremely hard time finding Reddit or del.icio.us in any results. Why is this? Let’s take a look at why each of these sites may or may not rank highly:
Digg:
- Lots of link popularity and authority. 8/10 Google Page Rank (if that means anything).
- Uses title of article in the page title well.
- Article title in an h3 tag.
- Uses title in search-friendly URL.
- Community comments make the page have more text and makes the Digg listing page like an article itself. It can provide more keywords and variety.
- They provide incentive to blog about their stories (and thus get more link popularity) by listing the Digg users who blogged about the story with a link back to their blog.
- There are sites like Duggmirror and blogs that basically just republish Digg listings and content so it drives more links.
Netscape:
- Even more link popularity than Digg, but this is a benefit of Netscape.com’s long time place on the web. 9/10 in Google page rank. This could account for why Netscape sometimes comes up ahead of Digg for the same stories.
- Uses title of article in the page title well.
- Article title in an h3 tag.
- Uses title in search-friendly URL.
- Community comments make the page have more text, but usually not as many comments as Digg.
- Didn’t see any incentive to blog the stories.
- Probably not as many mirrors or sites republishing their content as Digg.
Reddit:
- Decent link popularity at 7/10 Page Rank, but not as good as Digg and Netscape.
- Uses title of article in the page title well.
- No header tag around article title (ouch).
- Does not use the article title in the URL.
- Community comments make the page have more text.
- Didn’t see any incentive to blog the stories.
- Probably not as many mirrors or sites republishing their content as Digg.
del.icio.us:
- Link popularity is good and similar to Digg at 8/10 Page Rank.
- Does not use title of the article as the title of the page.
- Uses h4 tag for article headline.
- Does not use the title of the article in the URL.
- Instead of it really being comments and a discussion, users leave notes about the bookmark. They are usually very similar notes.
- No incentive to blog the stories.
- I’ve actually heard before that del.icio.us blocks search engines from indexing it with their robots.txt file. I haven’t researched if that’s true, but judging from how they have their bookmark pages set up it does not appear that they are trying to get good organic search results. I did find their tag pages listed in some search results however.
Searchmob:
- Low link popularity, currently showing a 0/10 in Page Rank. The root domain of battellemedia.com does have an 8/10 though, so that probably carries over.
- Uses title of article in the page title well.
- Article title in an h4 tag.
- Uses title in search-friendly URL.
- There is the potential for comments, but since it gets less traffic there aren’t many comments.
- It does take trackbacks which can encourage blogging the stories. Didn’t look too common though.
Social Site Summary
Based on looking at how they have set things up, Digg and Netscape are positioned the best to continue to grow from organic search results. This will be a key to break out of the tech audience and into the mainstream web userbase. If users find Digg through Google results they may be inclined to stick around. Also, as publishers learn about the value they can get from having their articles submitted to these sites, Digg and Netscape will get more submissions while other sites won’t.
It seems to me like Reddit and del.icio.us are missing the boat here and not doing some very easy things they could do in order to get their pages show up more in organic search. Do they not want traffic?