Scribd has seen a massive drop in traffic recently after they turned off some aggressive SEO techniques.
The site used to have a clever internal system which monitored the keywords sending natural search traffic and then added them to the page automatically to make the page seem more relevant than before and therefore get higher rankings. It seems that this feature has now been turned off.
We made some changes that will have a short-term impact on traffic. Primarily: 1) improving our copyright filter, which keeps unauthorized content off the site and 2) reducing the aggressiveness of our SEO, which reduces total traffic in the near term but increases the relevancy of Scribd links in search engine results
Displaying recent search queries used to find a page is a feature that might be useful for users especially if you use the keywords in a tag cloud to help determine what the content is actually about – probably more useful than relying on users to tag their own content. I can’t imagine why Scribd would decide to improve Googles search results without being forced into it by Google.
It’s interesting that Scribd has raised over $10m in funding based on big traffic rises thanks to SEO which is normally way down the list for startup companies.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I have to agree with you. Can’t really see why they would want to lose almost half their visitors by doing so, if they are not forced by Google.
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Well its a nice post and useful info posted here, thanks for sharing.
More comments from tag44yep its a nice post!!!
Thanks for the useful information. I recently started publishing on Scribd and found that it generated huge traffic to my business.
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