We followed it up in December by targeting key words for more popular topics like iPhones, Games, Twitter and Facebook)
One of the experimental hooks we created was a series of 3 posts on how to make money out of iPhone games. It’s fair to say we got lucky and within 2 weeks of the first post Excapite had claimed the number 2 position on Google for the phrase “how much money can you make from an iPhone game” and similar rankings for similar phrases involving making money and iPhone Apps or games. After 3 months the page ranking has slipped a few places but we are still on the first page.
The question is, having achieved a page one ranking in front of around 100 million other pages across the web, how much traffic did Google send our way? The answer is not much. The total number of referrals on the topic from all the Search Engines has been less than 200.
The chart below shows the page hits for the 3 Posts. As expected Christmas week delivered a spike in interest, as did the launch of the iPad. However the launch of the Nexus One had no effect on the traffic.
Page Hits (Dec-Feb) for the 3 iPhone Game Posts
The good news is the 3 posts have all made it on to the list of the all time Top 10 most actives posts on the blog. This isn’t surprising because Apple, iPhone, iPad and the Apps Store have all been hot topics on the web over the past 3 months. But I am surprised the high page rankings in Google didn’t deliver more traffic. Perhaps the Long Tail of the web is in reality a very long tale?
Jimi Bostock
March 25, 2010
I very interesting set of experiments. It is really a fun challenge to work out what Google is up to. I know that much of what I have heard been described as SEO is so out of date and seems to me would not do much.
I think the clue to google is now the real time and I am seeing much more trending on stuff that leads either directly or in one hop to any video
r us seeing any such thing