Of all the widgets I have added to this blog, Bumpzee has proven to be my biggest loss of traffic though many of the clicks out may already be subscribers.
People have to leave in one direction or another, plus with tabs, it might not be an exit anyway.

But I am sure Bumpzee has widened my reach and I have gained subscribers.

Also it seems a good time to develop a “Bumpzee culture” – the more readers I have who frequent Bumpzee, the more chance I have of rising above the surface when I write good material, unlike Digg where it is almost impossible to gain traction. That is a long uphill battle. Stumbleupon might be easier and is something I intend to highlight more here soon.

I’ve long thought that there is too much emphasis on SERPs position. I understand the reasoning and the rationality behind it, but it’s sort of like making the bible so important you forget about god, to use a religious metaphor.

It is also important to note that the almost manic emphasis we have on SERPs flies in the face of most basic marketing principles such as “People don’t want drills, they want holes”. Really, if all we wanted were SERPs then optimizing out pages for “kjadsfhbdakjghsdf” would be an excellent strategy.

However the point is that when we say we want SERPs what we really want is traffic (and that could go through this process a couple more times at least). So when we step back and look at things a little more closely, most of the time we are going to see that popular sites outranking us in the SERPs actually will bring us much more traffic than we would ever have gotten having the SERPs to ourselves; Provided that these sites link to us as the source.

For one of my recent posts no fewer than three social networks and your blog were outranking me for a search on the title of the post. However, I can’t find a single keyword tool that suggests anyone has ever searched for that title, and I’ve received traffic from all of these sources that outrank me. Trafic I would not have received from that SERP.

As I said before, and will happily say again, They can have the SERP every time if it means a net increase in traffic (and targeted traffic at that, and targeted, referred traffic to boot) for me.

Now the one caveat to all of this, as you pointed out, the site that’s outranking you must be pointing to you as the source for all of this to work out.

I’m getting ready to launch a new internet marketing related blog. One of the things I will be doing with that blog is releasing my content under a Creative Commons “Attribute” license. Which means that people can take the content from that blog and repost it, alter it, make it theirs, repackage and sell it, whatever they want, with the single requirement that they attribute the blog post as the original source. I’ll be adding some language to the license to control the method and text of the attributions, but it should foster reuse and lead to a lot of deep back links from sources that I fully hope out rank me in the SERPs.

This comment is getting nearly as long as the original post, but one final thought I have for people who might be concerned about this “problem”. I saw BUMPzee in the serps in a few searches I had done, but it was not until I saw a reference to them from a trusted source that I signed up. If that trusted source had out ranked them on some of those searches i might have visited and registered sooner.

nofollow an dpink boxes makes too much sense ;-)

On this blog I am doing things differently to what is recommended in Revenge of the Mininet because I like experimenting, and also because of relevance and a few things I have noted about tags.

For info on the subscribe buttons

http://andybeard.eu/2006/12/nofollow-and-pink-boxes.html

I am probably going to create a version of Sociable 2.0 with real dynamic links rather than using nofollow and make it available for download tomorrow if you care to wait. I didn’t manage to persuade the author to include nofollow.

any rhyme or reason?

If you have explained it already in your archives just point me a link.

I think maybe I’ll try the nofollow on my subscribe buttons etc. no need to pass link love along to that.

fascinating article. thanks for the mention