Not the most brilliant of discoveries, but a connection certain people like to deny exists.  Traffic exchanges destroy your Alexa rank.  There is no point in arguing the value of an Alexa rank, much like Google’s page rank, it has no value in its own.  However, certain advertising companies use it to rank sites. If you do paid posts or sell ads through an agency, then ranking well in Alexa helps.  I’d rather get $60 a post than $5.  Look what happened to turnipofpower.com after the infamous asshat incident.  I went from an average of 450 readers a day down to 300 readers a day.  The loss of those 150 toolbar droppers turned out to be a huge positive.

Look at another former member of Entrecard, Lyndi from Nice2All.com.  She stopped using that traffic exchange a few days earlier than I did. 

The question is why?  My bounce rates, though improved, are still relatively high.  My two current sources of traffic, Stumble Upon traffic and Search Engines, have similarly high bounce rates.  Thus the theory that Alexa penalizes high bounce rates is out.  Stumble traffic is also social traffic, so you can’t say Alexa hates social traffic.  Conspiracy theories about Spottt vs Entrecard?  Wishful thinking, but not likely.

The answer must be the exchange of pageviews.  Say 100 people all have the Alexa toolbar.  If those 100 toolbar users load the same sites routinely, that would be detected.  It’s the reciprocal nature of the traffic exchange that is detected and penalized.  Google does something similar with pageranks.  If I link to a site, and that site links back to me, then the effect of those links is weaker than a one way link would be.

This is why my own social network,  CMF ADS won’t be repeating this critical error.  The only benefit of visiting another member’s site is the pleasure gained from reading it.  Sure, when we see something we like we advertise there, Stumble the post, Digg, Mixx, Buzz, or whatever social media seems appropriate.  But traffic exchange?  Never.

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My last article on Bounce Rates explained why it was important for bloggers to keep rates as low as possible to avoid being penalized in the search engine rankings.  All things being equal, lower bounce rates equals higher ranking.  To refresh your memory, the following is the Bounce Rate definition given by Google :

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t care if people visit my main page and then move on, Google cares.  So I’ve made it my goal to try and improve my SEO efforts;  an early New Year Resolution of sorts.  To reach my goal I’ve reinstalled Google Analytics and have begun monitoring my ranking for my top keywords .   Here are some of the ideas I’ve been exploring:

1. Do not use Traffic Exchange Networks that encourage visitors to stay for 3 seconds just to drop a card or click a link.
2. Encourage more comments by responding as often as possible to existing comments.  Readers will see that their comment is meaningful to the author.
3. Use a plugin to encourage first time visitors to subscribe to my RSS feed.   I’m using the included module with Headspace2. 
4. Targeting my keywords more carefully.  Use the same keywords that I use for tags. 
5. Put more effort into writing each post.  Try not to turn visitors away with spelling mistakes and bad punctuation.  Break up monotonous blocks of text.
6. Be opinionated and let readers know how I feel.  Agree or disagree, people will be more likely to respond if you can invoke an emotional response.
7. Making careful use of the <!–more–> tag.  Let the reader get all the way to the good stuff, then hit them with the tag.  This only works on those who have bookmarked my front page.

As you can see, the idea is to engage the reader without annoying them and to make the content more relevant to my search visitors.

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Being one to ignore bounce rates, I didn’t really care how long people stayed on my page.  As long as I had any visitors I was happy.  Last April I even wrote a particularly vehement article against bloggers whining about bounce rates.  Since then new evidence has come out and I’m ready to change that opinion.  If you care about how you rank in search engines, you should worry about bounce rates.

Below are three well written articles that document the effects of bounce rates on SEO:

• Do Search Engines Use Bounce Rate As A Ranking Factor?
• Confirmed: Bounce Rate is A Search Engine Ranking Factor
• Google bounce factor research data is in

After reading through the above posts I came to the same conclusion as the authors.  Google is using analytic data to punish sites with high bounce rates in their rankings.  There is no point in removing the Google Analytics code either, since Google mines data from so many places.

Quite a diliemma.  On one hand we encourage fly by night visitors who drop in for a second or two.  By doing so we may be lowering our Search Engine rankings, thereby making it harder to find our site for those who may be truly interested in our content.

Why even care?  It depends on your site’s income model, if any.  For those sites supporting themselves through paid posts, then social traffic is fine.  Fluff your numbers and get that page rank up to 3.  If you have no website income, search engine rankings don’t really matter. 

For sites depending on Adsense, the opposite is true.  Try to limit the visits from untargeted social traffic.  It isn’t helping you at all.  Those truly interested in your keywords are the ones who will most likely click an ad.  If you use SEO rather than paying for Adwords, a high search engine ranking is money in the bank.  Not to mention the threat of the dreaded “smart pricing”. 

Below is a quote from Digital Inspiration directly from an AdSense Representative:

I’m sure you know that Smart Pricing affects on an account level rather than affecting a particular website, based on it’s performance. Your website is an established blog, with quality traffic, and the chance of it getting Smart Priced is very low. However, if you associate a new blog with your account, there is no guarantee on how it is going to perform, and based on that your account may or may not get Smart Priced.

Please factor in both these points, before you make a decision. If you are confident that the new blog will be akin to yours i.e. it will have great content, have quality traffic, and as a web property, it will be beneficial to our advertisers, then chances of it being threatened by Smart Pricing are very low.”

Quality Traffic?  As much as one can argue that bounce rates and blogs make no sense, if it means a few more dollars per check, then I’m willing to experiment on lowering my bounce rate.

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CMF ADS is running a great little Holiday Special.  Get a featured review, backlinks and 8,000 ad impressions.  Combined with geotargetting, you can’t beat this offer.  The review alone is worth the $20.  Details below:

For Advertisers who spend $20 or more in advertising between November 12 until January 1st, 2009, the following special offer will be available:

• Advertising at a $2.50 per 1000 pageviews.*
• A free review of their site/product on the CMF ADS Feature Website Page.  Review will contain at least one link back to the advertiser’s landing page, as well as at least one image linking to the site.
• All existing advertisers who renew campaigns during this time period will be able to renew at this special rate.

*All banners and landing pages subject to approval.  Individual blogs in the network have to right to reject any ad.

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