I had an unusual event yesterday at the Search Engine Watch Blog. One of our stories hit Digg at the same time another story became wildly popular through Google News. One case study does not a rule make. I repeat again, one example is not the rule. But in this case, Google News produced traffic way, way over what Digg did. Below, a look at what happened, with a lot of observations on the long search tail, getting credit through Digg, some fun stats and more.

Yesterday, I wrote a big story about how Yahoo had won among the search engines in being most relevant for providing election results, In The Election Results Race, Yahoo's The Winner. That story made it into Google News.

Meanwhile, Barry had written a brief that made it into Digg, Australia's Proposed Copyright Rules Would Make Search Engines Impossible, Warns Google.

Both spiked in popularity around the same time. You'd find our story on Google News in the top keywords results, as I'll explain more below, for several hours. Our other story was on the Digg home page for roughly the same amount of time, as best I can tell.

Let's do the numbers first. The election article drew 25,475 visits from Google yesterday. That's a ton compared to what we'd normally see for a story from Google News. Google was by far the biggest referring source to it (next highest was 400 visits). The Australia article drew 4,995 visits from Digg (the next highest was 346 visits).

Overall, Digg -- that site so many focus on getting traffic from -- provided only 20 percent of the traffic Google sent. But as I said, one example a rule doesn't make. I can't do any big takeaways, but I can provide a number of caveats and observations you might find interesting.

First, Search Engine Watch is fortunate enough to be included in Google News. Not every site has that opportunity while any site potentially is Digg fodder. If you aren't a news site, Google News won't likely show you love, any more than Yahoo News or other news search engines will. In contrast, Digg is more open to you.

Next, I tapped into an incredibly interesting news topic with an unusual spin at the precise time that Google had fairly poor results for that topic. Go back and read my article, and you'll see how I assumed tons of people would be searching for "election results" on Google. The article is about how when I tested this, I was disappointed in what came up.

I wasn't the only one. Some of the feedback I received:

Good article on the election searches. I found the same thing. Google was a mess of looking and researching. You would of thought they could do better.

===

As a political science major I just wanted to tell you that I loved your blog/research on the election results of Yahoo and Google. I loved it--even though I am a diehard Google fan! Thanks for a great post!

===

I'm just sitting here laughing as I read your column on Yahoo's search engine. I've been googling and I keep screaming, but who won? LOL At least I did get the hit to your article so now I can go to Yahoo's home page.

After I wrote my article, it started appearing on Google News for the same query I thought people would be searching for. As a plus, since it was clearly not on the same topic as some of the other articles, it stood out. It also stayed at number one or two through much of the day.

I can't tell if most people came because they couldn't find what they wanted on Google News or instead thought it was an interesting spin. I can feel good that I know if they read the article, they certainly got to election results through it.

Another observation. I've seen traffic spikes from Google News before. Almost always, these have come because Google has inserted us on the one of the Google News browsable pages, such as the Google News home page or the Google News Tech page.

That makes sense. Lots of people browse news, so that will perk traffic. In contrast, any single news event might have a variety of terms that generate traffic.

This time, it was the opposite. Perhaps lots of people on Google News turned to keyword searching because browse mode wasn't cutting it. Perhaps I just tapped into a motherload of keyword popularity.

Speaking of which, how about some long tail/search tail love in action. Here's the top 20 terms sending traffic to that story:

Those come from my Google Analytics reporting for the site. It's not entirely accurate [though pretty close], because there are terms I can see that clearly weren't consolidated. For example, consider this:

Those are actually all the searches using the words [election results] beyond the big chunk of 7,307. You can see a small group used title case, in other words searched for Election Results rather than election results. That wasn't consolidated into the overall totals (some like it separate so they can see the difference).

Some of the others, like that chunk of 111 down further in the list were those who searched for [election results ] with a space after the word. So the searches for election results as a term were slightly higher if you count in all the variations.

Overall, the top term I thought was important certainly was. But there were 3,025 terms in all, or so Google Analytics reports to me. Let's see that as a chart:

Yes, that's a tail! I wanted to show the whole thing. It doesn't look like much because around term 150 or so, all the queries are "onesies," terms searched for only once.

Let's zoom in:

And now let's really understand what the search tail / long tail is all about. I've long told people all those smaller terms add up. Here are the first ten terms versus the combined traffic of all the rest:

Who doesn't like the tail! Now to be fair, doing well for one core word is going to make your tail much, much longer. But down the line, I'm going to do a chart like this for all the terms for Daggle, which gets high traffic for no particular term at all. Despite that, all the onesies and twosies add up!

But what about Digg? Yesterday, our brief about Australia possibly wanting search engines to operate on an opt-in basis made it to the Digg home page for several hours. Google News traffic was well above what Digg sent -- but for what's still a relatively small and unknown service to the larger internet audience (compared to Google), Digg certainly can drive the users (just as Slashdot can).

Getting on Digg had nothing to do with me. Well, pretty much nothing.

For several weeks now, I've been monitoring if people submit one of our stories to Digg. I generally don't bother trying myself -- I've done exactly one myself. But if someone else likes one of our stories, it makes sense to know that and stick up a button on your story so others might vote for it. That's why Digg explicitly provides them.

Monitoring is easy. Go to Digg and search for your domain name, like this:

http://digg.com/search?s=searchenginewatch.com

By default, it will show you all stories for the past seven days, which is enough. Look on the page, under the ads, near the right-hand side. You'll see a feed icon. Put that in your feed reader. Now you're monitoring. If one of your pages is submitted, you'll know about it.

That's what happened with the Australia story. I saw someone had submitted it, and when I looked, it had about six or seven Diggs. To help it along, I added a Digg button. You can get one here from Digg. I actually prefer using code that I lifted from SEO Blackhat's tips on getting to the front page of Digg. Here's the code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.js">
</script>
<iframe src="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.php?u=
http%3A//REST-OF-DIGG-URL-HERE" frameborder="0"
height="82" scrolling="no" width="55"></iframe>

See that part in bold. Go to the page about your story on Digg, like the page for our recent story here:

http://digg.com/tech_news/
Australia_Can_Go_Back_To_Pre_Internet_Era_Warns_Google

Copy the part in bold, everything from the // onward and paste as shown above. Now you've got your voting button.

I can't tell if voting from my site drove the story higher on Digg or those at Digg itself made it happen -- but inserting the button couldn't have hurt.

Unlike those who were happy to find my election story via Google News, several of the comments on Digg were people who resented us. Several, but to be fair, a tiny number compared to all the comments on the page (though larger if you add those who Dugg agreeing with those comments).

If you don't like vulgar language, don't read below. And don't read Digg period, where those commenting often seem unable to express themselves without cursing:

It's called linkjacking, Bloggers love to write a 3 line description of a new article they saw then post it here in order to get people to read their crapass blog.

===

Yeah link jacking is the bane of the internet...

I run a *real* site based upon the blog backbone - one which actually has *real* content rather than stolen articles, stupid email fwds and linkjacks, and it's infuriating that these people have turned "blog" into a dirty word...

If you want to create a site with quality content, report on new unique things, that's fine... if not, adsense isn't going to save you... piss off and join a pyramid scam or sell used cars... your spam is not welcome on the internet.

===

When are people going to realize that BLOGS ARE NOT NEWS! They are written by self-important windbags who were either not skilled enough to become journalists or sensationalists.

These people were reacting to the fact that the person who submitted our story put us up on Digg, rather than putting in the actual article about the potential Australia move.

Not that I thought it would do any good, but I did explain on Digg that we didn't submit the story and that perhaps the person who did pointed at us because we also gave the context of the Australia move in relation to the recent Belgian move against search engines. For my efforts, well, you can read the further comments. At least Matt Cutts jumped in with a kind word to say maybe I wasn't full of it. Thanks, Matt!

Another person, responding to why Digg was linking to us rather than the news site, said this:

it's the payment for posting the news.

If that is why we got the link, I thought it was very kind and fair. Barry and I blog throughout the day at Search Engine Watch. Some stories we find on our own. Some stories are original content we have created. Some stories we find through others. If we find them through others, we almost always credit that source somehow, usually through a "via" credit. They found something for us. They deserve some type of credit even if we want to point to the actual story.

Jason Calacanis, running his Digg-rival Netscape, spoke to this exact issue recently:

One of the things that really frustrated bloggers when digg became popular was the fact that digg insisted that users link directly to stories--not the bloggers who found the stories. So, if Boingboing or Engadget found something interesting digg instructed the community to bypass those blogs and link directly to the source information.

The result? It looked like digg found the story and the people doing the hard work--the bloggers--got no credit.

The result? digg gets credit for being the place where cool things break, when in fact many of the stories are--for lack of a better term--stolen.

Now, I understand why digg came up with the rule. There were folks acting as "middle men" between good content and digg users. They would post a good story and link to their blog which provided no value. We have the same problem at Netscape today and we tell folks to not break the "middle man" rule which states that if you link to yourself you have to provide some significant value that the original source does not.

However, this doesn't solve the giving credit for finding something cool problem.

To solve this I've asked the Netscape team to add a [via WEBSITE ] link at the end of story capsules to give credit to the bloggers who work so hard to find these stories (see image above in yellow). I understand the issue because I'm on both sides of it running a blog network and a social news site.

I think this is a great idea. The only problem is that ordinary people at Netscape can't do it. If they spot a story on some blog, they can't do the via thing at all -- only the higher level Navigators can. At Digg, that's not an option at all. It should be, at both places.

I was also bemused by the people who knew nothing about the Search Engine Watch Blog and so assumed it was all contentless AdSense fodder. It's obviously not, with plenty of long, detailed original content. I've written many, many times on this particular issue going back for years, such as this story from 1998. But even a short brief like this is noteworthy of some credit being paid to the blog that found it.

Specifically in this case, I spotted the Australian story through one of the news monitoring alerts that I run, one on Yahoo. It was a small story that I hadn't seen anywhere else and that someone outside the search space might have easily ignored. I asked Barry to put it up.

Throughout the day, I didn't see any of the over 100 blogs or news sources I monitor mention it. To my knowledge, we were the first ones that found the item and flagged it as something people should really look at (and apologies if I've missed someone prior to us).

That flagging helped someone at Digg raise it to their community's attention. The Digg community clearly cared about it, since it made it to the home page. For our efforts, and there was effort involved here, some dismissed us as messing with the news process rather than being the reason Digg found out about this so quickly at all. Moreover, what we did in this case is exactly what those at Digg do -- spot news items and blog them up via Digg.

Also consider this, in terms of how we helped Digg. Right now, there's some buzz (and here) on how Digg beat Google News to getting the word out about the Rumsfeld resignation. OK, for one thing, the often dismissed as no longer useful mainstream media (MSM) made that happen. It was an Associated Press article that had the news, not a leak to some blogger. Someone at Digg spotted this MSM report, alerting the Digg community. With AP, Digg wouldn't have been "ahead" of anyone. But the story here is how Digg "beat" Google News. That's valid, but I think the old-style news sources deserve some mention in all this. (Postscript: After I wrote this, I came across Stray Packets talking about this exact issue in more depth).

And back to that Australia story? It came through a personal news alert I run. No one on Digg spotted the story before I did, yet given the number of Diggs, clearly people at Digg cared about this important issue. Someone at Digg reads our blog, linked to us with the news we were carrying and the Digg community benefited.

Not bad for some link-jacking, windbag-run, three-line description-writing blog full of stolen articles that's using AdSense because there's no pyramid scheme willing to employ those of us not skilled enough to become journalists.

Next Post: Maui's Green Sea Turtles & Other Diving Pictures
Previous Post: Now Departing: USS Intrepid Aircraft Carrier Museum!
All Posts: Daggle Archives
Posts By Category: Daggle Categories
Return To: Daggle Home Page

Comments

Want to comment? If you are signed into TypeKey, you'll see a form below. No form? Click on the sign-in link below, and you can sign-in or sign-up for a free account. Sorry you have to use TypeKey, but I use it to avoid comment spam. All comments currently appear automatically after posting.

Leave a comment

Name

Email Address

URL

Remember personal info?

Comments (You may use HTML tags for style)