How I Gained Traffic and Lost My Soul: Google Garbage™ Post-mortem

Last Thursday I detailed a rather questionable technique for achieving a quick increase in web traffic through the use of Google Trends. In a nutshell it involves using Google Trends to find rapidly-rising search topic with little competition, getting up a quick and keyword-heavy post, and pinging Google to get indexed.

On Friday I executed a crude proof-of-concept experiment, sacrificing this blog (and my own integrity) at the altar of scientific research. I made a total of 10 posts in the course of this experiment, which covered two updates of Google Trends (about four hours apart). I used different formats for each, ranging from all pictures to all text, from well-formatted for human eyes to pure data dump, intended only for Google’s robotic eyes.

I also posted on a wide variety of hot topics, from the death of painter Andrew Wyeth, to the Presidential Oath of Office, to some things I still have no clue about. Who is the “Numbers Lady”? Why were people seeking information about her on Friday? I have no idea, but I simply dumped the first page of Google results about that phrase into a post.

So what were the results? 

The Good

Google BlogSearch was easy to dominate. These posts had the number one position for most of these topics within a few minutes. However, Google web search was another matter. Since this blog is only three weeks old, has no PageRank yet, and few incoming links, these pages were buried deep in the web results.

Traffic tripled compared to normal. This will artificially pump up the numbers for the month – something I could use if I was negotiating with advertisers. Also, virtually all of these visitors were “uniques“, making the numbers look even better. And if I had CPM (pay-per-impression) ads on the pages, that would have made me some easy money. 

The Bad

On the other side of that coin: these unique visitors are people who will not return, so there is no long-term benefit.

Also, some of the pages had few hits. In retrospect I can see that they simply had too much competition – for example, a bio of the pilot who landed the plane in the Hudson River. Every major news outlet had this covered, so almost no one found this little corner of the web.

The Ugly

Because all that traffic was hit-and-run, there were no comments and zero interaction. Because I was posting on topics I knew nothing about, the experience was completely clinical, and in the end somewhat soul-crushing.

Worst of all, the most popular post by far was one entitled “Amanda Knox pics“. I had no idea when I posted this that Amanda Knox is apparently an attractive 21-year-old alleged murderer and sex criminal. I only knew that she was a hot search topic, and probably some new starlet – not far from the truth, as it turns out. So I did a Google image search for pictures of her, and dumped the results into a post. 

It was hugely popular; by far the most-visited of the day.

The lessons of this experiment are not pretty. What do the people want? Sex and death. How do they want it? In color.

So there it is: I did what I had to do; I visited the Dark Side, and I don’t care how much it pays – I’m not going back.