Accidental SEO: How I got 400,000 page views without even knowing it

In the interest of never letting the brilliant light of Douglas Adams fade, I'd like to drop his original observation of the phrase "it turns out."

The words of the sadly late, eternally great Douglas Adams:

“Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression ‘it turns out’ to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It’s great. It’s hugely better than its predecessors ‘I read somewhere that...’ or the craven ‘they say that...’ because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it’s research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight.”

I had something similar happen--found out a small feature I wrote six years earlier was getting nearly 3 million page views a month from almost exclusively iPhone users. Still not sure how they all found it (if it was just search engines I can't imagine the usage would end up being 99% iPhone users considering it's not iPhone focused).

AwStat is unreliable, or at least, I don't understand how it works. I'm getting something like 50,000 unique a month, but with Google Analytics they are only 2,500. Not even close.

I doubt the author does even get 10,000 unique a month. The keyword "it turns out" turns out to be a not so popular keyword with only 8.1K search per month. (Data From Google Adwords Keyword Tool)

This reminds me the time that I ranked #1 for something in the news because I wrote an article about the incident before it happened.

This incidence is an example of "QDF", or "Query Deserves Freshness". When a certain competitive keyword gets temporal spikes in links, tweets, and etc, Google uses QDF to give immediate boosts to these keywords on SERPs where it might not otherwise have been able to assault for years.

QDF is something that's supposed to hypothetically "turn off", but with the new valuation of tweets and shares, it seems increasingly likely that these social mentions are actually beginning to count (and persist) much like links.

See SEOMoz's study of how a similar thing happened to them for the term "Beginner's Guide" when Smashing Magazine tweeted it out suddenly even when it had existed (and not ranked for the term) for months: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tweets-effect-rankings-unexpected...

Were you able to capitalize on any of the traffic? Get signups to the RSS feed at least? That's the problem with junk traffic: most don't really provide any value other than raw pageviews.

Content is still king though.

Is it safe to admit publicly to handing out some copyrighted thing 400000 times? I don't think Feynman has been dead long enough for the copyright to expire?

Thanks for sharing the story, just wondering...

This is great writing. It might not satisfy those looking for a studied approach to the topic, but it's definitely real world. Made me laugh. Thanks for sharing.

Bad juju to post something that is widely read about how you promoted hundreds of thousands of times the illegal distribution of a book.

Isn't it very easy to rank for phrases that no one else wants to rank for? Sure you got some traffic, but it was probably almost entirely worthless traffic. Pick most any random phrase that no one else would ever want to rank for and you can probably get near the top of the search results for it.

Like others have posted, I have also had a surprising number of page views without knowing it. The secret for me was Google Images. Got an iPhone image from Apple's PR site and uploaded it to my homepage. Now my page shows up in image search on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Once I realized what was happening, I added some code to my webpage so that removes itself from the frame it's embedded in. It's essential the same as finding it on a web search, but it's page rank is a lot higher on the image search due to the iPhone image.

Note, for what it's worth, I could not find his site on the first page of Google using any of the phrases mentioned. I was going to check backlinks and the site isn't there to check.

The reason I was going to check is that there's no way he's getting that many visits on such an obscure term. There's simply not that many searches. Also without some kind of link, there's no way for a bot to even know your site exists.

Perhaps it's just me. I must be missing something. Maybe the article was a bit over-stated?

Last year my browser extension ranked on the first page of bing and yahoo for the keyword 'google' : It resulted thousands of impressions, but it fade out the next days of course. It's not very useful trafic of course.

now you taught SEO professionals put feynman lectures online in pdf with ads injected in feynman content! :)

It's well known that traffic and SERP CTR has a significant impact on rankings. About a year ago, I wrote a post on my blog about how to write a bot in Ruby using Watir, and I submitted it here. Within 24 hours, I had gotten over 1000 uniques and had a front page ranking for the term "ruby bot" and "ruby web bot". I run Google Analytics on my blog, and Google has provisions in its algorithm to account for "breaking news" and because my site rapidly received traffic and links, they chucked it up onto the front page for these terms.

I've maintained the rankings because of the links I received during that traffic spike as well as the traffic coming in through the search engine results. What better way for Google to test whether a site is actually decent or not than to rank it quickly because it's getting traffic, then keep it there or drop it based on the CTR and Bounce Rate of the site? It's possible to game these metrics, but not as easily as something like link or content spam.

For reference, the blog post is: http://www.layeredthoughts.com/automation/how-to-write-your-...