Earlier today Outbrain published the results of a study covering 100 million sessions on leading news and media websites. The data and growth rates for traffic sources on these sites are similar to the data that ManagedSEO has been collecting over the same period for some of the world’s most popular major sports websites. Sports websites typically have higher loyalty and rely less on social media for traffic so the total percentages are lower than the content sites in this study but the growth rates are very similar.

In February 2010 when I worked as the Director of Internet Services for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics we successfully generated a record breaking 291 million monthly visits to Vancouver2010.com. Over 65% (191 million visits) of these visits came from search engines and our SEO success made us the top sports website in the world during the Games. Despite our significant social media activations and a Facebook community of over 1.3 million fans we still only generated  1.5% of our traffic from social media. Since the Vancouver 2010 Olympics (13 months ago) the share of social media on major sports portals has more than doubled from under 2% to over 4% in March 2011. The return on investment in terms of traffic acquisition from a well executed SEO strategy and tactics is still much greater than that of investments in social media. That said, the growth rate and importance of social can not be underestimated and it may be a different story in 2012.

The study from Outbrain looked at traffic from 100 million sessions in the first quarter of this year. They found that search drove 41% of external traffic, with other content sites (31%), portals (17%) and social media (11%) coming behind. The numbers across over 20 million monthly visits to leading sports portals in March 2011 showed 56% of visits from search,  23% from other content sites, 17% from portals and 4% from social media. Not surprisingly, Google is the primary source of referral traffic to the sites monitored by Outbrain’s applications, responsible for directing almost nine times more traffic than the average site referrer. AOL’s homepage surpassed Yahoo and Facebook for the number two spot.

This study also confirms that social traffic is still of lower quality than search traffic. This is also consistent with our data for March 2011 where Facebook traffic to leading sports websites typically generated only 75% of the page views compared to visits originating from search. Twitter traffic was even lower quality and generated only about 45% of the page views per visit compared to Google.  Outbrain also measured engagement via bounce rates and “hyper engaged readership” (readers who view more than five pages in a session). In both of those cases, Content Sites topped the charts with the lowest bounce rates, most engaged readers. Search was a close second. Social media traffic created the highest bounce rate per session in the study.  It was very interesting to compare the Managed SEO Sports data to the data of Outbrain especially considering their data is made up primarily of News and entertainment sites. The full Outbrain study is available on their blog.

Google’s Matt Cutts pointed out during the official release that there was an 84% overlap between the sites reported using the new Chrome Blacklist extension and the 12% of results impacted by the Farmer Update. Google used this metric as evidence of the utility of this change to end users.

Key Findings:

• The ratio of low quality content on your website matters. Your entire domain will be penalised if your ratio of low quality content is too high.

• Your link profile matters more now than ever. If the majority of your links come from websites with a high ratio of low quality content the value of these links have been greatly reduced

• Duplicate content (including articles and press releases) have been devalued.

• Google is going to rely heavily on crowd sourcing in its war against spam

Key Recommendations:

• Focus on quality. Remove all poorly written, shallow, non-unique, or generally not useful pages from your website

• Do not create content for SEO purposes only – all content should have utility to the end user

• Focus on SEO and promotional efforts that create utility and delight fans… Google is placing more and more value on these signals

• Do not do undertake any link building initiatives that involve link schemes, content farms, low quality directories or low quality article sites

ManagedSEO, along with all other white-hat SEO companies, are very supportive of the Farmer Update. We strongly believe that Google will win this war against spam and companies that the companies that do the best job of aligning their content and services to what customers want will be the ultimate winners.

I’ll give you my take.

Link wheels and variations have been around for almost 8 years.  At first they provided an easy to use roadmap for quickly improving website ranking.

Just create a main site..  link 5-10 more in a circle and back to that site.. and voila!

A=>B, B=>C, C=>D…. L=>A

Linkwheels became main-stream SEO practice about 3 years ago in response to Google devaluing reciprocal links. It was a relatively easy transition for companies running large reciprocal link schemes to transition from reciprocal links to link wheels. The relationships between linking websites were already in place and it was as simple as defining the wheel and updating the links such that all links were one-way and non-reciprocal.

Usually anything that is easy just isn’t worth doing. And in this case it couldn’t be more true. As most black-hat tactics link wheels are totally unsustainable and they will not provide long-term sustainable advantage in search.

Black-hatters have increased the complexity of these wheels in an effort to sustain their advantage but the return on effort continues to decrease. Link schemes such as Pyramids,  triple hubbed link wheels (not really wheels anymore), etc. are still tricky for Google to identify but when they do the penalties are severe.

Although sophisticated schemes still deliver short-term gain the probability and impact of getting caught are not worth it. Unless you are extremely sophisticated in your scheme and you are a start-up with nothing to lose I strongly suggest you avoid implementing any linking schemes in 2011.

The traditional and basic link wheels are easily recognised by Google and they are getting better at identifying more complex link wheels. Google is at war with spammers and their SWAT team is becoming increasingly ruthless. I would go as far as to say that if you have any schemes currently in place I would proactively work to break these wheels.

Focus on your content. Create good content and great promotional campaigns. Only invest in natural link building.

That’s it.  Simple really.

Natural traffic is one way.  It does not all point to the same page, from the same host or to the same keyword.

Natural traffic comes from all random points on the internet and links in varying ways and depths of a site.

You need to make sure that your link building does the same.

Is this more difficult?  Heck yes it is.

Is it easily automated.  Heck no.

That’s what makes the difference.

Although the dominance of Google in search makes us all a little nervous most SEOs are grateful to have only one master. Google is the King of Search for 2010 and the market share held by Bing and Yahoo do not warrant any effort being invested in SEO tactics specific to these platforms. Yahoo and Bing are playing catch-up and whatever SEO tactics you deploy that help with your rankings in Google will also help your rankings in Yahoo and Bing.

Google has also been very helpful in outlining clear guidelines and recommendations for SEO. As long as you stay within these guidelines you can be as aggressive as you want and your efforts will deliver sustained competitive advantage. Many short-term black hat tactics are available that will drive short-term advantage in search but your advantage may only be one update away from being turned into a disadvantage.

With search being the primary source of traffic to most websites, and Google ruling search, you really don’t want to get in Google’s bad books. New start-ups can roll their dice with Black-hat SEO tactics but we strongly deter all of our clients to purchase links or participate in organised link schemes.

Be very careful to understand exactly what tactics your SEO is using and the inherent benefits and risks. Many SEO agencies are willing to take greater risks with your brand than the owners of that brand would if they fully understood the potential benefits and risks. Take the time to understand Google’s policies and challenge your SEO agency on their approach.

From time to time we will post some of our Industry and SEO thoughts. Typically we are too busy working on client projects to post as much and as often as we would like.

-ManagedSEO