Just over a week ago I started a poll to determine which keywords from the Technorati Top10 on that particular day would generate the best results regarding traffic, and being picked up by 3rd party syndication (some would refer to them as splogs).
I set very specific rules, though I broke them slightly
Just for arguments sake, I am going to say that 1 aggregator link is worth 20 visitors. I am going to look at the total benefit over the next 3 days.
Lets take a look at the poll results, and compare the results to the actual results.
[poll=2]
Sanjaya
This got me a fair amount of traffic (comparatively speaking) , but no backlinks, thus there wasn’t a huge amount of coverage for the keyword compared to the amount of searches.
If I had written something relevant, it might have actually gained a few links.
Joost
A few will certainly be shocked at so little traffic on this keyword. One of the reasons is because of the amount of blog posts covering the topic, thus supply exceeded demand, and my content quickly disappeared from view.
Twitter was a hard one to analyse, because I get a fair amount of traffic for Twitter related keywords. I had close to 200 unique visitors related to Twitter over the last 2 weeks, but very little of it was due to Technorati directly, and most of it was for content posted before this experiment.
Dell
I can’t even recall why Dell might have been searched for at the time of my post, I don’t follow Dell news. Looks like the people searching for Dell weren’t exactly keen to click through on what was obviously not Dell news, but it is surprising that what I would look on as a “money keyword” wasn’t being splogged by someone.
Habitaquo
This is the Spanish Language SEO contest – not much traffic but a registered link from an RSS feed widget. I also had a comment left which is more than I received from other keywords.
YouTube
This one is interesting – whilst I had no traffic from Technorati, I gained lots of long tail search traffic simply because the word was in my sidebar.
If you have content that is even vaguely related to YouTube, it would be good to include the word on every page, even if it is a nofollow link to an affiliate product.
Dana Vachon
Not a lot of search traffic, even though there was relatively little competition for the keyword.
Myspace
A very similar situation to YouTube – no Technorati traffic, but some from Google, caused by just having the words in the sidebar.
Harlan Ellison
Hardly a blip on the radar
Iran
Absolutely no traffic at all, almost suggesting that the search volumes weren’t real.
Habitaquo Was the Clear Winner
The reason it was the winner was because it provided me a link, which was worth 20 visits. It might not have been a permanent link, but it was registered, and the site it was on wasn’t a splog.
I broke the rules slightly mainly because of this one link – it created such an inbalance and thus I left things running a little longer.
It is obvious that people are not creating splogs for the terms that most people are search for (at least the top terms). You won’t find that conclusion in any of the “official reports” that get published about splogs.
Continued Testing
The UMBC eBiquity Blog a couple of months ago published the top 20 keywords being used by spam blogs. Now if those blogs were really spam blogs, and they don’t really define a spam blog, then they have to be getting their content from somewhere, based upon those specific keywords.
Some of these are actually money phrases, so it will be interesting whether will will pick up some traffic, or whether the blogs are blogging purely for the SEO benefit.
Another thing to note is that if these are the most spammed keywords, then this post will disappear fairly fast, as I am going to use the keywords in my tags.
adult auto big buy california cancer card casino cheap college consolidation credit debt diet digital discount dvd equipment estate finance florida forex free furniture gift girls golf health hotel info insurance jewelry lawyer loan loans medical money mortgage new online phone poker rental sale school sex small software texas tits trading travel used vacation video wedding
One thing I find remarkable is that all of them are single words, and I am sure some of those words should be joined, for instance “credit cards”, and they are all money phrases. Do people search for money phrases on Technorati? Maybe Technorati is just a holding station to recycle content on these keywords.
Anyway no poll this time, but I will publish the top 10 results in a week or so.
Feel free to leave a comment if you want to try to predict the winner. Remember about supply and demand.
3 Comments
I’m very new to blogging, and posts like this are helping me so much. Right now its still a bit like living in a foreign country, but I’m starting to pick up some of the language.
Thanks, for the good tips. I wish you tonds of traffic!
I’m going to link to your site…..becuase I think the content is worthwile.
Chad
http://www.chaddukes.org/
http://olddeadpresidents.blogspot.com/
I like golf, and my readers are a targeted bunch, so I like to blog about whoever won the past week’s tournament. That won’t make the top Technorati lists, but it makes for an interesting Sunday night and Monday morning (oops, supposed to be working) when the bucks start rolling in.
I’ll have to give this a try, especially as American Idol heats up. I noticed Sanjay was a leading term, Chikezie or whatever his name is will likely be another one. Hmmm, I guess I’ll be writing an American Idol post very soon!