January 2008 - Blog Adviser

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Blog Adviser - January 2008

Duplicate Content

January 11th 2008 08:43

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.

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Posted By: jon - Category: Orble Tips, Search Engines, Google

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Making the most out of image traffic

January 8th 2008 03:44

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!