Link Building, Search, and Influence: Not So Silly After All

Seth Godin recently wrote about how Digg and StumbleUpon can send (boatloads of) unfocused visitors to a site, and how people should probably focus on other things rather than trying to maximize this number.

My feelings are that the number of visits (and votes) you obtain from a strong social media presence have long-term benefits that transcend the spikes and that these deserve a discussion.

Authority Influences Search Influences Increasingly Targeted Traffic Over Time.

People use search to find what they’re after 85% of the time and top search results are obtained through authority and trust. Google ranks things based on its best guess of trust and authority, as does Yahoo!, Live.com, Technorati, and del.icio.us. We want links and votes from important groups of people for their click-traffic, but also so that we rank better in the search engines.

Godin may not be considering that this unfocused traffic is just the frothy, chaotic front of a wave after which important, difficult-to-acquire links follow. To use Godin’s terminology, it’s then the “sneezers” who use social media’s ability to sift out important stuff using crowd wisdom (votes in this case.) If you have remarkable stuff, social media can float you through “the dip” of today’s river of news in a way you’d never achieve otherwise.

In Purple Cow, Godin wrote:

• Sell what people are buying
• Focus on the early adopters and sneezers
• Make it remarkable enough for them to pay attention
• Make it easy for them to spread
• Let it work its own way to the mass market.

Sneezers have established trust in their community online – at varying levels – in sort of a steep tail. They resist marketing efforts to influence their words and protect their reputations. Words and Links from these people usually cannot be bought at any price, and they’ve probably forgotten what a press release looks like. They have earned, through authority granted by others, a place in the search engines’ hearts.

So take a fictional moderately popular Digg post that brings traffic to your site…

• Short term Digg Visits: 5000
• Short Term Exit Rate: 90%
• Short term Conversions: 0 (dry those tears, it gets better)
• Rank for your favored keyword on Google before: 40
• Short term Influencer Visits: 200
• Influencer links: 5
• Subsequent sub-influencer links: 50
• Visits (over time) via the influencer links: 5000 targeted visitors.
• Visits (over time) via increased search rank: 5000 somewhat targeted visitors.
• Digg who?

Okay, you can beat up my numbers but the point I want to make is that this traffic is a means to an end, not the end itself. By the time you’re seeing the effects of your work on social media, you have long fallen off of the front page of Digg, and your Stumbleupon traffic may be in the dumpster. The beat goes on.

To sum up…A popular Digg/Stumble/Reddit post has these effects:

• A often dramatic spike in traffic – with a high bounce rate. Noisy.
• Attention granted by influencers who use Digg/Stumble votes as a filter on what’s important.
• Improved search rank due to persistent authority linkages from relevant conversations elsewhere.
• A sustained increase in relevant, high quality traffic through the direct-click traffic of the new links found in the long-tail of referrals from influencers.
• A slow increase in trust for your site as an authority by the influencers (they may look more closely at your next post / product / idea. Darren Rowse calls this a “Digging Culture”
• Increased attention via RSS and newsletter subscriptions.

Anytime someone mentions “Digg” and “Conversions” in the same paragraph, I get nervous. So let me know what you think about this explanation.

So Seth, from a big fan, I say to you that silly traffic might not be that silly after all.

Illustration by geishaboy500 used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License