Digg this! A Link Building (Baiting) tactic.

A few weeks back Daniel Tynski wrote a post (social media marketing) on SEOmoz.org detailing an experiment effectively utilizing social media to gain links to his website. Basically Daniel’s strategy for gaining links to a page on his site was to write a compelling article which would be hosted on a page on his domain, submit the article to Digg, and analyze the traffic and links back to the page.  In 7 days, the page garnered over 3500 backlinks. One thing to note was that the page that he submitted to Digg, although hosted on the same domain, had nothing to do with the overall theme of the website.

Some interesting things to point out:

1. Although the links from pages that typically had nothing to do with the theme/content of the domain  and that the page was part of but not linked to by the other pages in the domain, the rankings for their targeted keywords within the site jumped 20-300 places in Google SERPs.
2. The rate of idexing for the site by Google has increased, as the number of the domain’s pages indexed has also increased.
3. In Yahoo, there was no signifcant change in the SERPs.
4. The number of indexed pages in yahoo has decreased.

It’s very interesting to see that a page that is not related in any other way to a website other than being hosted on the same domain can have that much effect on search rankings of targeted keywords for other pages on the domain. I wonder how long this tactic could be used as an effective Social Media Marketing/SEO tool until the search sites change their algorithms. I also wonder how much weight Google puts in the use of anchor text of backlinks to the page. Lastly, I would think that the increased page views would lead to higher# of conversions but a drastic decrease in conversion ratio. This goes to show that sometimes content is not always king. Cool stuff.

You do not know King as well as you think you do. You believe you have great influence over him. You will end up as his slave-like all the others!

$1 do the first person that can tell me what movie I’m refering to.

Posted by Rick Garcia in Social Media, Search Engine Marketing