TRAFFIC
huge amount of churn. This just
validates my point about pages being
constantly tested.
● The audition analogy
Imagine, you’re asked to audition on a stage.
You get up, you do your song and your dance
and it’s not good enough so you get pulled off
the stage. Next time round, you will have to
really persuade the casting director to let you
get back up on that stage. This time you have
sung well and danced nicely…now you can
stay. I see all of this activity on Google as a
gigantic auditioning process.
● Blogger experiments
Moz
The best-known experiment in this area
was by Rand Fishkin from Moz. On April
30, 2014, he had a page titled: IMEC
Lab: help test and validate web marketing
hypotheses, which ranked seventh for key
phrase ‘IMEC lab’.
He subsequently asked his Twitter
followers to perform a search (see Figure 5).
Between 175 and 250 people are likely
to have clicked on this search result. Within
three hours, he checked back and his page
ranked number one for the query ‘IMEC lab’.
He also looked at the search results
in Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
UK, South Africa and Ireland. The only
territory where rankings increased was
the US. He puts that down to Google
understanding the locality of clicks, thus
affecting rankings where the clicks came
from, in this case the United States.
Bartosz Goralewicz
He decided to build a bot that manipulates
click-through rates. Being the nice guy
that he is, he decided to experiment on
himself. To do that, he chose a post that
ranked between number 1 and number 2
for keyword ‘Penguin 3.0’. This blog post
picked up a lot of natural links, so it was
strongly positioned.
He then launched the click-through-rate bot
and programmed it not to click on his own
Figure 4: Serpwoo.com graph showing a URL moving up and down
for keyword ‘life insurance’
Figure 5: Moz’s Rand Fishkin’s Twitter call to action
blog post. This massively lowered his clickthrough rate, and rankings dropped rapidly.
What’s fascinating about the graph in
Figure 6 is how there was an immediate
spike downwards, then an attempt to re-rank
the content followed by a steady decline
back down the rankings. It’s a bit like the
auditioning process in reverse, where Google
is giving this page a second chance.
Terry Kyle
Terry Kyle is relatively unknown in
mainstream