SEO Dance

My time blogging for SEO Dance is coming to an end. I just have too much on my plate to really give this blog the attention it deserves. I have learned a lot because of blogging at SEO Dance, and it’s been a great experience. Lately I just haven’t had the time to really dig into search engine techniques and news. So, I’ve decided to step down to give someone else a chance. Maybe a new blogger will take over the site soon.

I will still write for 451 Press at Wiirally.com and Msstate-college.com. Come by and visit when you can.

So you write a great post, and someone diggs it. You decide to send a shout out to your digg friends asking for a digg for your story, hoping that you will move the coveted front page of Digg. Will your marketing effort land you on the front page and the massive amount of traffic that follows popular stories on Digg?

First of all, if you are banking on your friends’ diggs to help you out, then you need a lot of friends. Making the front page of Digg will take a lot of diggs. Here are some numbers from a week’s worth of Digg’s most popular stories with the first number representing the popular stories of the day and the second being the least amount of diggs for a story:

March 27 - 105 diggs, least digg - 240
March 26 - 78 -least diggs - 266
march 25 - 95 -least 332
March 24 - 71 - least 277
march 23 - 61 - least 350
march 22 -42 - least 302
march 21 - 76 least 263
March 20 - 89 least 204

So, just like in high school, there is a small percentage of stories that actually become popular on Digg. While a popular story will bring you a lot of traffic, it will take either a lot of work or sheer luck to have it make the popular list.

And no, this isn’t an April Fools Prank. As of March 27, they no longer use Google to conduct searches. Now search results through Blingo are a mash of Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com.

If you haven’t heard about Blingo, it’s from Publisher’s Clearing House. You conduct searches like normal but with each seach, you have a chance to win a prize like a $5 Amazon gift card. The $5 prizes are the most common but some prizes do have a higher value. Get your friends to sign up, and everytime they win, you win, too.

Now those clean, search results are garbled with ads that bleed into the actual search results. Sponsored results are mingled in between actual results and look very much like a normal search hit except it says ‘Sponsored by’ in front of the web address. Many people seemed displeased with the change since Google offers clean results and clearly marked sponsored ads. I conducted a search for ‘casual games’ on Blingo today, and sponsored ads definitely blend in with regular results. I do like that it is marked which search engine the result came from.

Searches now might offer a wider variety of result options now that three search engines findings are displayed. Either people will get used to it or they will might find move on to another win and search engine since apparently there are several of them out there.