This past Tuesday night (and, eventually, Wednesday morning), Rand and I sat down and “wrote” a post that we were quite sure was rather amusing. Admittedly, posting to a widely read SEO blog after getting little sleep and consuming three beers and two cocktails isn’t advisable. We were, however, relatively sure that we were on to something good.
And we had. We had stumbled onto a linkbait idea that hadn’t been done before and that people seemed to enjoy. As of right now, the post has received 2489 diggs in just over twenty-four hours. It went hot while Rand and I were flying back from Long Beach, where we’d attended SMX Social Media. When we’d boarded the plane, the post had 150 Diggs. When we checked it again after arriving back in Seattle, it had 1800.
I’m a bit of a linkbait snob now, so although I was pleased with this result, I didn’t find it all that groundbreaking. It wasn’t nearly as astonishing as a recent incident where one of Rebecca’s old posts from Drivl received 8448 diggs eighteen months after it was written. We were only disappointed that it didn’t manage to crack 10,000.
What I’m really saying is that 1800 or 2400 diggs wasn’t something we hadn’t seen before. I closed my SEOmoz and Digg tabs and headed off to Facebook. A couple of people had written to me about the post, but Jeff Coyle‘s message, asking “Did you notice Google Trends?” caught my eye. Immediately, I knew what must have happened.
To maintain my faith in humanity, I want to guess that some of the thousands of people who searched for our terms did so out of curiosity as to what Google really returned. I’d hate to think that the 83,000 people Digg sent were all lazy enough not to read our short introduction.
After we had taken a good look through the Google Trends results, we tried to objectively think about what they meant. The first conclusion we came to was about the nature of social media in general. We’ve always believed that linkbait traffic is the most fickle of all. Whilst we still pretty much believe this, we were quite incredulous at how many Digg (and perhaps StumbleUpon) visitors took the time out of their digging and stumbling to open Google and search for our phrases. That is dedication on a level rarely seen from these two sources.
If I’d known that this was going to happen, but did not know how how popular each phrase would become, I would have guessed that the phrases I’d actually linked to (“number of horns on a unicorn”, “what time is it in sydney” and “what is the answer to life the universe and everything”) would have done a lot better. All people had to do was click through from the post. I won’t go as far as to say that social media visitors aren’t as fickle and mindless as we originally thought, but I could never have predicted that enough people would perform searches to influence something as universal as Google Trends.
It amused us no-end that the Rick Astley term beat out “cure for fever” and “i know kung fu” to be the most popular phrase. I like to think of this as us Rick Rolling the Internet. Its related searches also must have confused the hell out of most observers:
There might be an interesting inconsistency in this logic, however, as people who visit images aren’t usually exhibiting very long attention spans. What was so compelling about our images that cut down the bounce rate and prompted people to head for Google?
The explanation is probably related to what we always tell people about linkbait: the best content, and the content that will show the most astounding results, isn’t just interesting for a few seconds. It prompts people to do something. I dislike using widget bait as an example right now, as we’re not entirely sure how the debate about such tactics will end, but one of the great things about quiz bait and widgets is that they make people do something. They elicit action, rather than a “Back” click. In hindsight, our post obviously invited action, albeit action on someone else’s site.
Another thing we did well was not to make it too obvious that our results were fake. If we’d posted an enormous disclaimer at the beginning, letting everyone know the nature of our post, I doubt we’d have seen the Google Trends results. Perhaps our phrases still would have sneaked into the top 100, but never into the top five. As an aside, the stupidity of Digg was made readily apparent when people started reporting our post as inaccurate. Yes, the title is (deliberately) misleading, but a simple click-through would have calmed diggers’ accuracy-obsessed nerves. We also would not be the first people to have enticed click-throughs in this manner.
I took a fair number of screen-caps last night, but this one probably amused me the most. I’m not sure how many times top Google Trends keywords include both punctuation and deliberately misspelled words.
The lesson here is pretty easy, although I don’t know how much luck anyone will have in replicating it. If you’re concerned with page views, create linkbait that prompts people to search for something for which you already rank number one. Hope that the post gets 1500 – 2500 diggs and hope that people click through from the search results pages. I want to know if people clicked through to the sites which rank well for our terms, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on the available traffic data for those sites… perhaps a new form of linkbait has been unexpectedly born!
