What Does It All Mean?

One of my older articles has just gone whooosh out of nowhere, in terms of sudden traffic.

I'm used to them all following a pattern.  Day one and two, up we go, as the social networking kicks off.  Then, after a week or two, they slowly settle into whatever hits they're going to habitually generate.

This particular article did all of that.  But over the past few days, it's suddenly starting climbing. Then steeply climbing.  Then climbing like whoa! 

I've checked to see where they're all coming from, but it's Google.  Lots of Google.  All over the world Google.

It's not seasonal, topical or anything like that. It's one of the first clutch of articles that I wrote here. Any idea how you'd work something like this out? 

Your topic could have gained a sudden popularity (for whatever reasons) and as a result, people were searching for it more. Since your page was already established in the SERPs you would be in the right spot at the right time, and get a fair chunk of the sudden interest.

If it isn't topical, then it means google likes your article 

I think google tracks how searchers interact with your page and if the indications are good then the page gets pushed up the rankings. Your article may have been pushed up to a position that makes a signification different to traffic. 

If it one of your first articles here than it is around 2 to 3 months old, correct? In my experience that is the time span when content 'settles' from the Google dance through the SERPentines in its more or less stable position. And if that position is high enough, more people will find it and potentially link to it / like it etc which will make it even rise more if all goes well. So hopefully you will get even more traffic over time, SY

Tell us what the article is and I will try to see if there is a reason.

It may just be that some backlinks have hit from somewhere and that has pushed you up the serps. That would be good news as it would be constant traffic from now on rather than just a spike 'coz the article was topical.

Jo, sounds to me like your gaining an ebb and flow with the Google Gods.  This meaning you will soon notice a following spreading to your entire body of work here, that's my thoughts, manifesting them... :) Enjoy the flow of positive and prosperous energy!

Thank you all for your wonderful insight and words here. I'm feeling very positive now!

Chaz, it's this one:

Impossibru! A Marriage Proposal by Internet Meme

Don't forget - Spring is in the air! Lots of people look for marriage proposal ideas! (And, testosterone-filled minds can't think for themselves.)   

Congrats!  I thought this was going to be a post about some kind of philosophy which is something I do not understand in the least, but here we are talking about traffic. 

Jo, stats for your page:
PR = 1 
Backlinks from unique sites = 3
Impossibru ranks 38 in G serps
'Marriage proposal' ranks 25
No other KW in URL or Title ranks in top 100

One way to ascertain which KWs are sending the traffic is to use Google Analytics New Version 'Home', 'Real Time (beta)', 'Overview', 'Top Keywords'.

That is if you still have analytics available to you.  

LOL, Chef. I'll bear that in mind!

Paula - If it had been about philosophy, you'd have seen Philosoraptor... oops!  Here he is!

NOW we're talking philosophy! :D

Humagaia, Ah!  Thank you.  *disappears for a long time watching that live time page* That is really fascinating.  Thanks. <3

The keyword is Impossibru, followed by 9gag. 

But even more lovely are all of the people finding my pages through typing in Welsh.  They're all landing on either the St David's article or the love spoon one, but the key phrases are so sweet.  I have nearly a whole page of people telling me that they love me in Welsh.  A chi, cariadiau!

Impossibru 9gag is only ranked 98 in google.com and 95 in google.co.uk

That would not give you any traffic

So it's still a mystery. :/

Thanks for looking it up.

Impossibru to tell. . .

humagaia: 22. Mar 2012, 19:54

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Impossibru 9gag is only ranked 98 in google.com and 95 in google.co.uk

That would not give you any traffic

Unless perhaps Google's personalized search results algo is already kicking in???

Sam, are you suggesting that Jo has thousands of Google+ followers who want to get married?

humagaia: 23. Mar 2012, 04:10

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Sam, are you suggesting that Jo has thousands of Google+ followers who want to get married?

Lol, no, but I think that there is more to the G+ button and Google's personalized search results than we might think at first. Or simply a big user of G+ has clicked the button?

The couple who actually got engaged use 9Gag.  It's mentioned in their blogs. If either of them (or their friends) Google+ it, could that account for the surge?

I also experimented last night with friends searching 'Impossibru' and '9Gag'. None of them could see my article on the first page, but it was fifth for me.  That was still true even when I clicked the 'Don't Be Evil' button.

Definitely pointing towards personalised to me.

PS Paula, good answer!  LOL

I had an article at hp I wrote in 2008 (will be here very shortly). I wrote literally a 10 step solution to a problem I discovered was a HUGE market. It was something my mom told me about when I was 13 years old that she read in some magazine and the tip literally changed my life overnight. I'd for years shared this with friends with the same problem and it had a 100% success rate of solving a very big problem (there are some fun stories about results)...

When I joined HP about a year in I realized instead of repeating myself over and over and over again to help my friends and people I saw with the problem, I decided to just jot it down in an article and publish it for no other reason than to point people to it so I could stop repeating myself.

It was a very short "hub", about 400 words max, 10 steps laid out in maybe one short paragraph per step, then I lined the bottom of the cage with a few of the stories (because I didn't want to get it unpublished for not having enough content).

The irony is I didn't have anyone left to point to it, it's like I wrote that and the situations stopped presenting themselves to share the information- owell. I left this article as is, the only monetization was the automated adsense ads on the site, I had no clue about capsules with ebay/amazon etc...

I forgot about it and about a year later it started to pop up on the radar DAILY from comments left on the hub. Within about 3 months (so 1 year 3 months- no interaction other than maybe responding to a few comments- the bulk of them were "this works amazingly!" and the like.

Comments started to flow in at about 10-30 per day with some days with nothing, even weeks then bam a burst of comments. It seemed my article was helping thousands of people every day. At that 1 year 3 month mark after about 8 months of consistently getting a few to a lot of comments my traffic started to ramp up until it reached around 3,000 a day, it settled over the next year at 2,500 a day (1,300 on a bad day or slow day).

This one article was earning me about 200-300.00 a month and continued that trend (some 800-900 comments accumulated, trickling in every day at at least 3-5 but many days 10-15 average)... I was stoked!

I decided one day to check the title of my article to see where it was in Google, and apparently I'd chosen a perfect keyword as the first 8 words of the title, and for that "keyword" I didn't even try to create, I was number 1 on Google, first position first page, and stuck there until HP unpublished it.

The social commenting was amazing, people were no longer talking to me, they were talking to each other, and it would go on and on like a chat room with one long day that lasted years... seeing it at the top of the serps I decided to see if that kw was available in domain form and IT WAS! Astonished I purchased it and extended the hub's reach to all areas of the niche by writing about 16 articles and creating a whole site covering everything those 800 comments asked for, issues they had, questions (about 400 relevant to new information added), and more.

I pointed the hub's traffic to the site in a link and introduction/talking about it, at the top "for more information, we've built a site to answer any questions, give you workarounds for the ingredients (not food hub)," and so on...

Of the 2500 average unique a day it got, 1500 went to the site (according to Google analytics), and my adsense click income was half the hubs income so in essence I almost doubled my income just by creating a site and linking to it from the hub- I also came to realize ALL traffic to the site was from the hub exclusively.

I came to the realization that maybe I could just move this content BACK to hubpages, link each page together in a series and from the main hub and could make more since there were some impression income choices on HP I couldn't get on my own site (big ad agencies they added last year)... So I painstakingly built the hubs and even expanded the content from 500 words to 1k each (based on panda paranoia). It was a gold mine.

I came to realize my idiocies in not even attempting to use ebay and amazon (the only two other monetization choices there) on them and thus started to put them on. I spent over 3 days 8 hours a day setting this up (we're talking about 16k words to add capsules to and I wanted to maximize my income)- I started to watch the ebay sales and amazon sales and within days of adding these I was making sales. 10.00 here, 30.00 there, it was very exciting- this was about 2 months ago and it all started to ramp up every day- then I got shot in the kneecaps when my acct was banned for ridiculous reasons-

If I can make money there I can make money here- it's just going to have to "rev up" again over the next 6 months to a year. I did notice I was here for one day and published the "why do we say bless you when we sneeze" article/wizz that I was on the second page of Google position 6 within a day so it goes to show our articles get indexed fast- I know Google likes to give you ranking fast then it tapers down based on interaction (comments) traffic, backlinks, etc... but still- just that it got on there at all that fast shows promise.

I wish you all luck, I can't wait till I have some articles moved over- I'm being a perfectionist so I'm spending way too much time on each one but my motto is if you set it up right the first time (and perfect it as you learn more about the tools here), you don't have to touch it ever again (adding interactive polls, comment boxes etc... keeps it fresh)...

Jerrico

Wow! Thanks for all of that.  It's always really encouraging to hear success stories like this. And good for you on meeting a knock with just bouncing back. :)