This is an installment of the ongoing “Metrics Series.”
When is being FIFTH 5x better than being TENTH? When you get in the Top Five of search results, of course! We’ve watched the power of being a Top Five search result for a very popular search and, in real time, watched what happens when we fall out of the Top Five.
Let me explain. Boxxet is still a very young site (been out for two months) and so we are still working our way up as an highly ranked site in Google and other search engines.
Several times, we notice that a certain news event would drive a lot of traffic to our site through a high ranking on a Google search. We would be ranked in the Top 3 or so. Partially, this is due to our crawlers doing a great job getting stories quickly. And partly this is luck (Google crawled that part of our site at the right time). We can easily measure the hourly rate of inbound traffic for such a search.
But as other more highly-ranked sites get the same story and get indexed, the Boxxet result falls down the rank. First to 6-10. Then off the first page to the mid-teens. And we can measure the traffic change.
Here is our estimate of what it means to be in the Top 5 / 10 / 20 of search results.
- Top Five is 5-6x better than Top Ten (6-10)
- Top Ten is 10x better than Top Twenty
I have seen references to more formal studies out there, but there is nothing like direct experience.
Filed under: Boxxet, Metrics Series
March 21st, 2007
You Mon Tsang
A long-overview wrapup of some coverage we got in January when we did a public launch of Boxxet.
For most part, we got extensive and thoughtful coverage, even though the traffic brought to Boxxet was surprisingly weak compared to traffic we get from general pop culture news. See my post “Jennifer Aniston vs Web 2.0“
From VentureBeat, where Matt Marshall is doing some great Valley coverage, “Boxxet offers sites on popular topics”.
From ZDNet’s Dan Farber, who I really admire and run into a lot at various industry parties, “Boxxet boxes up popular topics”.
From Webware’s Rafe Needleman, whose career I have long followed, “Boxxet packages the Web for you”. Interesting thing about Webware. The web site didn’t drive a ton of traffic to us, but when the same story appeared later in the week in their newsletter, the volume was pretty darn good. Yeah to email newsletters!
From the super-thoughtful all-around good guy Dylan Tweney, “Boxxet: Channel your enthusiasm”.
From Mashable, which I like a lot but I think Peter misunderstood us in this post, “Boxxet Launches - Will You Contribute for Free?”
From GigaOM, where I am becoming a fan of Web Worker Daily, “Boxxet Launches Automated Portals”.
From The Deal Blogs, which has a negative writeup, “The problem with Boxxet and other topic aggregators”. They are entitled to their opinion, but there is no byline to this off-the-mark driveby analysis. I’ve gone back a few times to check in on them and generally find that they have both snap positive and negative opinions. Caveat emptor.
From Search Engine Land, a must-read for anyone interested in search, “Boxxet Offers ‘Best Of’ Collections On Popular Topics”/
Filed under: Boxxet, Press
March 5th, 2007
youmon
