Answers.com losing Google traffic and failing on Digg
Answers.com seems to have taken a hit recently and lost a load of Google traffic.
Search engines change rankings all the time and unless Answers is attracting links at the rate of its competitors (Wikipedia) its bound to lose out at some stage. The dip must have been quite large, they had to send out a press release about it:
We are working diligently to analyze and address the recent algorithm change,” said Bob Rosenschein, CEO. “We will update investors on the financial impact of this development during our upcoming Q2 earnings conference call on August 13.” “The major search engines modify their algorithms all the time,” added Mr. Rosenschein.
Answers seems to be trying to figure out social bookmarking but they don’t seem to quite understand Digg. A Digg button on the Answers.com homepage leads to this story submitted last year. Digg stories have a 24 hour window to get popular - nobody told Answers.com it seems. Maybe if they understood social networking a bit more they could build their Google traffic back up. Nobody wants to link to pages full of PPC ads.
The story on Digg is also full of spam which doesn’t do much for Answers credibility.
Categories: Google, Social Media
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Some great points you bring up. Search engines are indeed changing all the time, but you need to keep the inbound links coming to stay in the game. New Wikipedia links are popping up everywhere, and that has a great deal to do with the no-advertising Wikipedia has in place.
I still have yet to get into social media marketing, but it is a powerful tool and it’s only growing even faster.
Jonathan August 3, 2007 3:33 pm | Reply
I don’t know whether you realize this but google links to their definition for all words when doing a search. Answers is a client of Seomoz.
bestoptimized August 3, 2007 8:46 pm | Reply
I was aware of the definition link, not sure how much traffic that would send compared to having good organic rankings. SEOmoz might have their work cut out on this one.
Patrick Altoft August 3, 2007 10:20 pm | Reply