A while back I made a post about a new technique I was using to bulk post shop-like pages to my Mens Underwear Site. You can refresh your memories here.
I promised then to come back and do a follow up re: how the pages have performed. I think the results can safely be described as “mixed”. I’m really happy to report that Google seems to consider them adequately unique to keep in the index and rank them well. As with all site pages some seem to be performing better than others in terms of rankings which I’ve put down to: -
1. Competitiveness of search terms / cleverness with which I identified groups in the merchant feed niche enough to rank and popular enough to actually get me a bit of traffic!
2. The bloody mindedness of Google which often behaves oddly when ranking site pages / determining relevance. Particularly with newer sites such as mine. Old posts often start performing months after they have been put up for reasons best known to the G-meister.
3. The fact that they were probably not targeted in the same way as they might have been had I used my instinct / market info about what styles and collections would sell well.
Conclusions?
I think the most interesting thing to have come out of that particular exercise for me was less about creating blog posts en-mass and more about landing page structure. Having monitored the performance of those pages I now realise they are far more likely to convert traffic to a sale and are also good enough to send PPC to – great if there’s a hot product that’s had media coverage or is simply selling well. That is a real positive and has resulted in me starting to use a more refined template based upon the one I used in my test for any blog content that goes up for the site. It takes a little longer to create the pages by hand, but they are way more effective.
Will I be using bulk posting going forward? At this stage, no. Not because it wasn’t great at creating nice looking pages in bulk, but because I felt I was putting my effort into something that ended up being very “hit and miss” in nature. I think my quest to find ways to improve my user experience and get lots of useful content up there in the SERPS without the “long and laborious” manual process of posting up content will have to focus elsewhere.
The other issue is that I’m in a quandry about the effectiveness of churning out blog post after blog post generally. I’m increasingly finding that the posts are very hit and miss to get rankings for (probably due to the blog structure). Although I’m sure writing lots of blog content is beneficial because it keeps the site fresh, I’m currently having a good think about whether or not I should divert this time into some other activities that might have the same effect with less effort. Currently I spend 2 hours most days engaged in this, which seems like an awful big chunk of time.
As always, my quest to make sure my time is spent most effectively for best results goes on!
September 29th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Definitely a combination of #1 + #2 I’d say! While competitiveness can make a big difference (e.g. you may get the odd random hit from searches which return 100 million results, yet you are on page 1 if non-comp), there has been an awful lot of google shuffling so far this year…!
September 29th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Interesting post thanks kirsty.
I have tried similar tests with similar results, what I do find that you quickly build up a huge collection of indexed pages. There is then potential to fine tune and modify these pages in line with any terms they are ranking well for. It seems to be quite a decent tactic.
Neil
September 30th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I have been running some tests also. Assuming you have all your ping services set-up on the blog (see the ‘Writing’ tab in ‘Settings’ on WordPress), I find that every time you do a new post, Google will come wondering to take a peak at your website. It will pretty much re-index the site from the minute it gets a ping.
Google also likes a bit of fresh content and will reward you with a few extra positions in the search results. This extra boost seems justification enough to keep writing little an often. Make sure though that if you want your new web-pages to get noticed you will need to do a mini post… just to get those pings out there.
A little and often seems practical enough but I never seem to get round to writing enough posts to keep my own sites floating as fresh sites.
Remember “Keep those post pings going”!
I have seen some sites publish an article every 30 minutes through-out the day. Now that is some publishing effort by they do get cracking results in Google.
October 29th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Hi,
I agree with you that the Google will come wondering to take a peak at your website. It will pretty much re-index the site from the minute it gets a ping. Google always like the fresh content for indexing of any website. So we need to post the new content regularly because a good content always play the vital role for any web site ranking high or low in SERPs…….
Keep up it…We are keen to read your post!!!!!