“Site Activity” and SEO
ByThere is a new piece to the SEO puzzle we now have to consider. In the past, content and backlinks ruled. Quality backlinks would always trump content as Google placed great importance on them. However, there’s a new kid on Google’s block.
Google is incorporating “site activity” into its ranking algorithm. No one knows just how big of a part it plays yet, but I’m guessing it will be significant in the future.
What “site activity” means is simply how much traffic comes to your site from various sources. The traffic might come from YouTube, article directories, search engines, email marketing, etc.
In other words, there might come a time when simply having great content and getting quality backlinks are not enough. Sure, the backlinks themselves will generate site activity, but some will produce better than others to be sure. Google is simply saying that there must also be visitors actually coming to your site. Great content and a few hundred backlinks alone are no guarantee of visitors.
We know that Google is buying browser toolbar companies. Alexa is the best known tool bar; I imagine Google would LOVE to own that one! What the toolbars do for Google is collect data. With access to the toolbar data, Google does not have to rely on their Google analytics, traffic sent to sites via their search engine, or PPC. They will know of EVERY visit to every site, regardless of how it arrived, with the toolbar data from specific computers.
I believe adding the site activity aspect to ranking placements is a good thing. It can’t do anything but improve Google’s ability to identify relevant sites.
But how is a webmaster to satisfy Google with site activity without yet ranking well? The “easiest” and quickest way to get traffic to a site is via twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Sure, it takes some work. But we all thought having to get one-way backlinks was a lot of work too in the beginning.
From my experience, the smaller the niche, the less importance Google puts on site activity (at least for now). I am still able to rank very small niche sites by only having good content and a few backlinks…but that may change in the future as Google tweaks and refines their algorithm to make site activity more important.
Twitter’s working for you to some degree at least, Steve – that’s where I came from 🙂
(Only you’ll know how fast it worked though)
It makes sense that smaller or more narrowly targeted niches would have less reliance on this as a ranking factor, since there’s not as large a traffic sample to base it on.
But even then, if 95% of the traffic comes from a single place, it might not be a good thing.
Correct, you would not want to rely on just that initial traffic from twitter, etc. But in larger niches, it can get you “over the hump” in the search engines so you can begin ranking and getting organic traffic.
what about advertising site through banner ads, is that would be good way to generate traffic and site activity to your site..?
Yes, for this purpose, traffic is traffic….site activity is site activity.
Just wondering about bit.ly links and links that comes from a post on Posterous and then send out as a tweet? Or even link sent from twitter out to places like Facebook and such?
Many of the bit.ly links are used for sites that add no follow tags….like twitter. Links with no follow tags don’t count for SEO purposes (except they do provide site activity ). Anytime you want to see if there is a no follow tag used, just look at the code of that page and find the link to see if no follow is added to it.