
Accidental SEO: How I got 400,000 page views without even knowing it - jsomers
http://ginzametrics.com/accidental-seo.html
======
jaysonelliot
In the interest of never letting the brilliant light of Douglas Adams fade,
I'd like to drop his original observation of the phrase "it turns out."

The words of the sadly late, eternally great Douglas Adams:

“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be
incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative
connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the
trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great.
It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that...’ or the
craven ‘they say that...’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy
bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new,
ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were
intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”

~~~
arctangent
I used this exact phrase in a presentation today and it helped me gloss over
technical details that my non-technical audience did not need to listen to.

DNA's books are full of other good advice, although I have yet to try his
approach to flying ;-)

~~~
jaysonelliot
I have to confess to, just once, when I was about twelve, trying to "throw
myself at the ground and miss."

------
jonknee
I had something similar happen--found out a small feature I wrote six years
earlier was getting nearly 3 million page views a month from almost
exclusively iPhone users. Still not sure how they all found it (if it was just
search engines I can't imagine the usage would end up being 99% iPhone users
considering it's not iPhone focused).

~~~
avichal
What did you write? 3 million pageviews a month is amazing.

~~~
jonknee
A mobile version of the Drudge Report. Before the days of modern smartphone
browsers it was an especially frustrating site to visit and I wrote a scraper
that reformatted out all the long lists of unchanging links. Didn't think
about it (or use it much really--it was more of an academic exercise) and then
years later realized it had gained [significant] popularity.

The news out of Japan has increased traffic. 140k page views yesterday and
3.4m in the last rolling month period according to Google Analytics.

~~~
alanfalcon
It would be amusing if someone was somehow selling your website as a simple
web view app on the App Store.

~~~
jonknee
Bing bing. That's what it is. There's both a free and paid version. Time to
contact the developer...

~~~
sireat
So what are you going to do? The easy thing would be to just shut it off, but
more amusing thing would be to make the news links nonsensical (ie go to Onion
etc).

Of course, the best thing would be to get your own cut of the revenue.

~~~
jonknee
I asked for money and if I don't get it will cut it off. It takes a bit for an
update to make it through the App Store, so I have a bit of leverage.

~~~
alanfalcon
Instead of cutting it off, can you just add some ads on the page? Many will
probably complain, leave 1 star reviews, and stop using the app, but in the
meantime you'll make some money off the app (even the free version).

Whatever ethical issues inherent in profiting off scraped content have already
been bypassed by asking for money, though any issues with the law could be a
bigger concern.

~~~
jonknee
After balking at payment, I have cut him off and asked that profits be donated
to the Red Cross. We'll see, crazier things have happened.

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csomar
AwStat is unreliable, or at least, I don't understand how it works. I'm
getting something like 50,000 unique a month, but with Google Analytics they
are only 2,500. Not even close.

I doubt the author does even get 10,000 unique a month. The keyword "it turns
out" turns out to be a not so popular keyword with only 8.1K search per month.
(Data From Google Adwords Keyword Tool)

~~~
eli
It's bots. Google Analytics starts out by only counting clients that run
javascript, so that eliminates most automated queries right there. AwStats
looks at actual requests from server logs, which is going to count a _lot_ of
requests from poorly written comment spam botnets, email scrapers, and other
non-vistors.

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PaulHoule
This reminds me the time that I ranked #1 for something in the news because I
wrote an article about the incident before it happened.

~~~
rkudeshi
Ok, I'll bite - what incident/article?

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InfinityX0
This incidence is an example of "QDF", or "Query Deserves Freshness". When a
certain competitive keyword gets temporal spikes in links, tweets, and etc,
Google uses QDF to give immediate boosts to these keywords on SERPs where it
might not otherwise have been able to assault for years.

QDF is something that's supposed to hypothetically "turn off", but with the
new valuation of tweets and shares, it seems increasingly likely that these
social mentions are actually beginning to count (and persist) much like links.

See SEOMoz's study of how a similar thing happened to them for the term
"Beginner's Guide" when Smashing Magazine tweeted it out suddenly even when it
had existed (and not ranked for the term) for months:
[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-
unexpected...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected-
case-study)

~~~
kgtm
The 400K pageviews he is referring to were for "Feynman Lectures on Physics",
which was a PDF, which had zero backlinks and wasn't mentioned anywhere.

You are of course correct about QDF. The first half of his post is indeed
relevant to that, but the major point is further down.

------
glenstansberry
Were you able to capitalize on any of the traffic? Get signups to the RSS feed
at least? That's the problem with junk traffic: most don't really provide any
value other than raw pageviews.

Content is still king though.

~~~
jsomers
To a certain extent, yes. After the "it turns out" post I think some people
went around to other parts of my site and started submitting different posts
to HN. There was one point where I had three posts simultaneously on the front
page (it was a glorious moment).

That converted into about a doubling of my RSS subscriber base to just over
100.

But culling RSS subscribers seems to be mostly a game of posting and linking
and getting buzz on close a daily basis, whereas I'll occasionally have one or
two months of inactivity.

Otherwise, somewhere between 0.5 and 1% of visitors ever check out other
posts.

------
Tichy
Is it safe to admit publicly to handing out some copyrighted thing 400000
times? I don't think Feynman has been dead long enough for the copyright to
expire?

Thanks for sharing the story, just wondering...

~~~
true_religion
He said it was accidental, and he meant to put it in a private unindexed
directory.

~~~
Tichy
Does that help (who pays for damages in accidents - copyright owner could
claim loss of 400000 sales)? Also even in the private directory he probably
wasn't allowed to own it.

I am not judging him, I am only concerned for him.

------
auxbuss
This is great writing. It might not satisfy those looking for a studied
approach to the topic, but it's definitely real world. Made me laugh. Thanks
for sharing.

------
gohat
Bad juju to post something that is widely read about how you promoted hundreds
of thousands of times the illegal distribution of a book.

------
almost
Isn't it very easy to rank for phrases that no one else wants to rank for?
Sure you got some traffic, but it was probably almost entirely worthless
traffic. Pick most any random phrase that no one else would ever want to rank
for and you can probably get near the top of the search results for it.

------
solipsist
Like others have posted, I have also had a surprising number of page views
without knowing it. The secret for me was Google Images. Got an iPhone image
from Apple's PR site and uploaded it to my homepage. Now my page shows up in
image search on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Once I realized what was happening, I added some code to my webpage so that
removes itself from the frame it's embedded in. It's essential the same as
finding it on a web search, but it's page rank is a lot higher on the image
search due to the iPhone image.

------
DanielBMarkham
Note, for what it's worth, I could not find his site on the first page of
Google using any of the phrases mentioned. I was going to check backlinks and
the site isn't there to check.

The reason I was going to check is that there's no way he's getting that many
visits on such an obscure term. There's simply not that many searches. Also
without some kind of link, there's no way for a bot to even know your site
exists.

Perhaps it's just me. I must be missing something. Maybe the article was a bit
over-stated?

------
ecaradec
Last year my browser extension ranked on the first page of bing and yahoo for
the keyword 'google' : It resulted thousands of impressions, but it fade out
the next days of course. It's not very useful trafic of course.

------
fedd
now you taught SEO professionals put feynman lectures online in pdf with ads
injected in feynman content! :)

------
ddemchuk
It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on
rankings. About a year ago, I wrote a post on my blog about how to write a bot
in Ruby using Watir, and I submitted it here. Within 24 hours, I had gotten
over 1000 uniques and had a front page ranking for the term "ruby bot" and
"ruby web bot". I run Google Analytics on my blog, and Google has provisions
in its algorithm to account for "breaking news" and because my site rapidly
received traffic and links, they chucked it up onto the front page for these
terms.

I've maintained the rankings because of the links I received during that
traffic spike as well as the traffic coming in through the search engine
results. What better way for Google to test whether a site is actually decent
or not than to rank it quickly because it's getting traffic, then keep it
there or drop it based on the CTR and Bounce Rate of the site? It's possible
to game these metrics, but not as easily as something like link or content
spam.

For reference, the blog post is:
[http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write-
your-...](http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write-your-first-
ruby-web-bot-in-watir-scraping-weather-com)

~~~
_delirium
I can believe that CTR has a significant impact, but how could traffic have an
impact? Matt Cutts says explicitly that search doesn't touch any data from
Analytics in any way: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU>

~~~
epoxyhockey
It's not from Analytics.. Log out of your gmail account, clear your cache, do
a google search for "it turns out" and then right-click -> copy the URL of the
first hit. Then, paste that into notepad.

~~~
_delirium
Isn't that just how they count CTR / from-Google traffic? I thought the
previous poster was suggesting that traffic _from HN_ to his blog was upping
his Google ranking (in addition to CTR), because Google detected a traffic
spike indicating some variety of trending/breaking news. But if Google doesn't
use Analytics data for ranking, how could they know that his blog was getting
a spike of traffic from sources other than Google search?

~~~
bigiain
Note the post you're discussing explicitly says "SERP CTR":

"It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on
rankings."

We can see they're measuring it, it's obviously at least worth investigating
as a signal, I'd be absolutely astounded if they aren't using it.

(I'm also a little surprised at Matt's continued insistence that the search
team don't use CTR data from the Adwords and/or Analytics teams data. As a
user-of-search, I'd like them to use _all_ available signals, and I suspect
the Google Analytics data contains information which would noticeably improve
the quality of search results).

~~~
ig1
It would probably be illegal. Google is the dominant player in both the
analytics and the search space, using it's dominance in one area to strengthen
in dominance in another would practically be asking for an anti-trust suit.

Plus it's incredibly easy to rig google analytics data, you can just modify
the GA javascript you're serving.

