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Copying content from other sources on the web for your own blog will hurt your search engine ranking. Google (and other search engines) take into account the "uniqueness" of a site's content (text and images) in their ranking algorithms.
If a site (or page on a site) mainly consists of text or images copied from another website they will usually rank poorly. Just changing the order of the paragraphs will not help either, or just copying just a segment of the text. If you want to duplicate content safely it needs to be completely rewritten.
This also applies to "quoting" from another source. Quoting is fine, but make sure that no more than 1/3 of the text of your post consists of a quote from another source. Copying an entire article, and then putting a link to the source after it with a few quick comments is not a good idea either. You would be better off simply having just the link and your short comments without the copied text.
In summary? Quality unique text and image content is best.
Those of you that have been with Orble for more than a year have probably noticed that your traffic has grown consistently over the year. As the network grows larger, if you write often enough, you'll find that search engine traffic comes your way.
When reading your stats, it's important to remember that Page Views and Visitors are a different metric. We're interested in the number of actual people coming to our sites, which is a tough number to pin down, as there are a lot of robots surfing the web these days.
The truth is, people looking for images are, generally speaking, rarely going to click on Google Ads. And they're unlikely to read anything you've written, too, which means this is not the ideal type of traffic that we'd like.
Still, beggars can't be choosers, and some traffic is better than no traffic.
To show you what we're looking at, I've posted some details from my traffic to provide some insight.
First, let's take a look at types of people that might visit your Orble page through Google Image Search:
1) People looking for dirty pictures
Look, there's no way to avoid this. It's an integral part of the Internet. Most people are looking to slate their lust on digital images, and they vary from people looking for soft bikini photos, to people looking for hardcore pornography.
What's interesting about this, I suppose, is that you'd probably think that people you meet in real life are fairly normal. The sheer volume of traffic looking for dirty photos suggest something else - the people you meet in real life have a seedy personal life that you've never imagined.
2) People looking to copy images for their websites
Since I write about movies and use movie images in my posts, I imagine that quite a few of my visitors are looking for this. They just want to copy an image from the internet, to post on their site, or store on their computer.
3) People that found your website by an incorrect search result
Sometimes, Google Image Search returns the wrong results, but people may still click on your site, out of curiousity.
4) People looking for an image, then looking for further information about that image
This is the best category of traffic... these people found your site by searching for a particular image, then they've gone deeper into your post to read what you've written. Hopefully, they'll leave a comment, stick around, read other posts.
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I'll open up the vat of secrecy and show you results from my page, 20/20 Filmsight:
Traffic (Jan. 8, 2008):
Hit Count: 7946
Individual Readers: 4080
Link Readers: 3666
The Hit Count, I ignore, except to feel good about myself. The important metrics are the Individual Readers and the Link Readers. We guess that the number of humans visiting the site is between 3666 and 4080, which I'm pretty happy about.
Email Subscribers: 52
Great... people subscribing to the site is always good for business.
My Top 10 most popular pages, as of today:
726 (445) www.moviecritic.com.au /2007-07/
540 (343) www.moviecritic.com.au /femtroopers/
274 (178) www.moviecritic.com.au /day-of-the-dead-remake -movie-trailer/
254 (181) www.moviecritic.com.au /the-banquet-ye-yan-film -movie-review/
223 (190) www.moviecritic.com.au /the-300-spartan-fitness-rout ine- from-gym-jones/
212 (140) www.moviecritic.com.au /star-wars-tattoos/
194 (111) www.moviecritic.com.au /ews-50-best-high-school-movi es/
191 (129) www.moviecritic.com.au /dragon-war-trailer-preview/
186 (42) www.moviecritic.com.au/ rss/summary.xml
184 (96) www.moviecritic.com.au/
The first result is 445 people looking at a picture of Betty Page in a bikini that I posted when the Chauvel Cinema was doing a burlesque night.
The second? Over 300 people looking for Femtroopers, girls dressed as sexy Stormtroopers.
The fourth post is a review of a Chinese movie, "The Banquet", which is a terrible, terrible movie, but is famous for having a body double for Zhang Ziyi do a nude scene. Guess what people are looking for?
Right there, that's almost 1000 people looking for dirty photos. It makes the site look good, but these visitors are hardly the type to sit around and read. They're too frisky to stick around.
Posts number #3, #5, #7 and #8 are people looking for images of certain movies, I suspect. Some of them are looking for the review, a few might read my post, but most of them, I guess, just want to see the picture, and probably save it.
The last two items are my RSS readers and the people that visit the main page. Ideally, the number of people coming to the main page should be high. This is the detail you want to improve... you want people coming to your site everyday, to read what you've written.
In terms of percentages, let's look at my top 4 referrers:
2162 images.google.com
596 www.google.com
394 www.moviecritic.com.au
352 www.orble.com
Straight up, half of my traffic is from Google Image Search. Sure, it's nice to get 600 people coming in from Google.com, and 352 from Orble (thanks everyone!), but the stat that's of most importance here is the 394 from moviecritic.com.au
These are people that have come to the main page and clicked on another link, I guess. These are the readers I want to keep, though it's the Google traffic that typically leads to better ad revenue.
From these stats, we can see that image traffic makes up a huge percentage of the total traffic on Orble sites... this isn't ideal, but the idea is to turn some of those Image Seekers into readers, which will, hopefully, turn into better ad revenue.
Next week, I'll post an article on how we can get Image Seekers to stick around.
Comments or questions? Post 'em in the comments below!
I've unleashed the inner geek and done some research into how an Orble blog can be expected to perform over the first 500 days of it's life.
These results show that:
Bloggers need to persevere through the first 6 months of a blog's life when they are getting very little traffic. After this point blog traffic usually increases very quickly.
Patience and persistence are key.
Disclaimer: These results are based on data taken from the Orble network of domain blogs. I have no data on blogs outside of Orble however I would expect Orble blogs to perform better than average due to the fact that they are all networked together and that Orble bloggers are usually well trained. I'm not at all biased 
The first graph is the most important and shows the number of readers on an active blog over the first 500 days of it's life.
The graph shows that traffic does not really start to take of until the blog is a year old, and that traffic is particularly slow before the 6 month mark. No wonder so many bloggers give up. However if you persist until the blog is 500 days old (about 16 months) you can expect to have a blog with around 900 readers per day.
I have defined an active blog as one that has had at least 3 new posts in the last 20 days (this is measured for every day in a blog's life, not just the most recent day). Publishing three posts every 20 days is not that arduous I'm sure you'll agree.
You can expect even more readers if you follow all the advice on this blog and the blogging tips blog. It's amazing how many bloggers don't follow the simplest of advice and pull down that average
If you understand the above then you have got the main point of this post: Don't give up! Be patient and keep blogging if you want to succeed. The rest contains a whole array of graphs which are interesting but will only add incrementally to your sum of knowledge.
Next we take a look at what happens when you post more frequently than 3 times every 20 days.
As expected the more frequently you post the better you do. Especially towards the end of the 500 days when blogs which post at least 10 times every 20 days attract about 75% more traffic and those which post only 3 times.
From the graph it looks like there is not much difference between the frequencies for the first 200 days however if we look at just those days:
we can see that it's actually just the scale tricking us. Increased blogging frequency is an asset from the outset.
From this graph we can also see that the first 120 days of a blog's life is particularly brutal with traffic remaining stagnant, and most bloggers do quit before they reach this point.
This pattern can be partly explained by the fact that it takes a long time for word of mouth about a blog to build up to a critical mass, but it's mainly to do with Google. Everyone's favourite search engine just loves older blogs which are frequently updated.
But, I hear you ask, perhaps it's just that older and more frequently updated blogs have a larger library of posts to attract traffic. It's got nothing to do with age and posting frequency, just the number of posts on a blog. I'll just do 500 days worth of posts in a couple of mad days at the start of my blog's life then all the traffic will come straight away. Not according to this graph which actually quite surprised me:
It shows the number of posts on a blog vs the number of readers averaged over the last 3 days (I've removed the outliers for clarity). As you can see there is very little correlation. The number of posts on a blog has got very little to do with the number of readers.
This does not mean that a large number of posts on a blog is a bad thing. It just means that your blog needs to be frequently updated to take advantage of it. Also stuffing a whole heap of posts onto a young domain will not work. Age and frequency of posting are king.
How much of this effect is to do with age and how much with frequency? Could I just put a heap of posts on a blog and then wait for 500 days? This following graph compares inactive and active blogs:
As you can see from this graph, inactive blogs (with at least 20 posts in total to give them a fighting chance) attract far less traffic than active blogs. This shows just how important it is to keep your blog active over time. Without regular posting the traffic to your blog will drop off significantly.
Another Caveat: Some of the trend of the frequently updated blogs could be explained by the fact the bloggers who are getting few readers become discouraged and drop out. Their blogs become inactive and just the good ones are left which contributes to the rising trend.
The reason I don't think that this a big factor is that the number of active bloggers does not drop off that much after the 200 day mark, and even less after the 400 day mark. If a blogger is still going after 200 days they are quite likely to continue for some time. Despite this decline in the dropout rate the trend of the graph continues unchanged which would indicate that dropout has little effect.
Now I'm going to up the geek factor another notch and bring in log graphs. Look away if you don't like math
If you look at the very first graph of active blogs over 500 days those of you who do know a little math will notice that it looks vaguely exponential. Now I'm the last guy to try to fit a line to a graph and start making wild statements, and we all know that exponential growth can't last forever. But if we do go logarithmic we can have a stab at what to expect as a general percentage rate of increase in blog traffic over time.
Here we can see that an exponential is in fact quite a good fit to the data and than it shows a 0.9% increase per day (compounded) in readers over time for active blogs (as defined by at least 3 posts in the last 20 days). Not bad.
What's quite interesting is that we get the same result if we up the frequency to 10 posts in the last 20 days.
It's the same daily increase of 0.9%. However with the more frequently updated blogs the increase is coming of a higher base after the initial wiggle at the start of the graph. So if this trend continues I would expect more active blogs to attract proportionately more and more readers as time goes by.
Well that's all of the graphs I've had time to make I'll be doing more detailed research as time goes by so watch this space and remember to always take statistics with a grain of salt, it's a complex world out there which will defy those who try to simplify it too much.
What are the main lessons we should take from this?
1) Don't give up in the first 6 months of blogging when you are getting few readers.
2) Post as frequently to your blog as you can. It will pay off.
3) If you are starting a new blog it really pays to take over an old inactive Orble blog which has already aged . You can see a list of Orble's inactive blogs here, abandoned by people who did not read this post
There are many ways to get your blog to deviate above the average. For some of those ways have a look at the other posts on this blog.
Very Small Appendix:
The metric I've used to measure the traffic for a given blog is the number of Link Readers. Link Readers are those readers who have clicked on link to arrive at a page on a given blog, or who clicked on a link while they were there. It probably underestimates the true number of readers by around 20% but it's the most stable and reliable measure we have that excludes those pesky robots.
Most bloggers write about recent events and people who are currently in the news. This is a great way to attract readers because we all like to know what is happening in the world around us. However recent events usually have a limited shelf life. After a couple of days or weeks people will mostly lose interest.
There are however many topics which people will always be interested in and which most bloggers overlook because they are so focused on what is new. A few examples
[ Click here to read more ]
Most successful blogs obtain a large percentage (80% or more) of their traffic from search engines so it's very important to know how they work.
Search engines rank websites by counting the number of other websites which link to them -- called incoming links. The more incoming links your website has the higher your ranking will be for search terms relevant to the content on your site. However it's actually more complicated that this
[ Click here to read more ]
Using the Meta Tags and URL correctly for each post on your blog can make a big difference to the amount of Search Engine traffic your blog will attract.
There is a lot of debate amongst the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) people about whether meta tags are used by the search engines at all anymore. From my experience if the search engine trusts your site they will at least take notice of the Title meta tag
[ Click here to read more ]
A blogger contacted me yesterday asking why Google had suddenly stopped sending her blog traffic. After a bit of questioning I discovered that she had added a number of new categories and had then gone through all the posts on her blog (a couple hundred) and had added them to these categories.
This has the effect of creating a large number of new pages very suddenly. Not only does each new category create a new page, but each new category combination creates another new page if there is a single post that is in both of them. So after creating just 5 new categories she had effectively created around 100 new pages which was about a 50% increase in the overall number. Changing the name of a category (even just one letter) can have the same effect
[ Click here to read more ]
Image search traffic accounts for a huge proportion (more than 50%) of the total traffic of most successful blogs so it's very important to be absolutely on top of making the most of it.
There are a couple things you can do which will help
[ Click here to read more ]
Categories are essential for organising all your posts to make it easier for you readers to find what they are looking for, however they can also be a very useful tool for attracting search engine traffic.
Because each category page has a lot of content -- a list of post summaries -- with great keywords and text they are very good at attracting search engine traffic with high volume keywords if named properly. In fact they are much more effective than a single post targeted at the same keywords would be
[ Click here to read more ]
Frequent posting is very important to successful blogging for a number of reasons. The first is that there will always be fresh content to encourage your readers to visit often, preferably every day. The second reason is that the Search Engines love blogs that are frequently updated and will send your blog more traffic not just to your new posts but to all your old posts as well. The third reason is that regular posting will quickly build up the amount of content on your site which is also another key factor in attracting search engine traffic.
So how often should you post in an ideal world
[ Click here to read more ]
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10 Posts dating from October 2007
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jon
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