I wasted more than 100k unique SE visitors.
 

This is a little tip for GFY:

I have a project that was semi-important to me, was supposed to be a huge freesite with tons of content pages and hundreds of pictures. Something a lot more important then came up on my to-do list and I had him stop on the project.
Up to that point my guy had finished ~25% of the total content sites..

I was just going through the stats of some of those older projects and noticed a huge increase in traffic on that specific site coming 100% from SEs.

this month alone it had 25k hits from yahoo images, 4k from altavista images, 3k from alltheweb and 2.5k normal yahoo search traffic.

now what is special you may ask.. those aren't pretty impressive numbers...
well - I would agree in general but
the whole site has not a single incoming link
I never linked to it and neither google and yahoo show 1 single backlink on ANY of the content pages, let alone the main domain, the site shouldn't even come up on the eninges.

Now how did this happen than?
Both, me and my guy (the only ones surfing on the website in the beginning to check the progress of the work) had the yahoo toolbar installed on our machines. I assume we did a lot of clicking on the pages :winkwink:

use that knowledge
my free tip of the month :)

oh... before i forget it...
you may ask why the traffic was wasted :)
So the site was unfinished and I didn't bother to put up any sponsor links on the redirect pages which means all the happily clicking surfers were always sent back to the index instead of going to the paysite lol

installing yahoo toolbar while working on my new seo pages. :thumbsup

Interesting... are you absolutely sure there isn't a link anywhere on the web to those pages? Maybe a public server log or a referral url from someone else's logs?
WG

there probably will be links by now but this is not important right now.
it started from 0
brand new domain (one that did not recieve any typein traffic in the first two months) and only 2 active surfers
me and him

this site should never had grown
you know where I am going ;)

oh and... we started putting the site on the server at the mid of the month... around the 15th, 16 or even 18th
I just checked the webalizer stats for that month again:

user agent #1 with 48%:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
user agent #2 with 22%:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/
;)

Does what you are talking about start with a letter in wiredguys nick but not in mine? If so please shhh ;)

URL ? :glugglug

interesting thread.

hehe :winkwink:
I will let you know the url when the site is finished and you can't outrank me by making an even better site ;)

its celeb traffic btw which is why the volume is rather high

to be honest I have no idea what you mean lol
send me a mail with the word you have in mind :)

This is subject to debate, but I view most toolbars hahahaha spyware. Try for yourself, create a new subdomain off one of your domains, browse it with various toolbars installed and VOLLA! You will notice various search engines magically checking out your new subdomain. It is also subject to debate if this is a good or bad thing...

how can i outrank you with better site if i don't even have one, and yours is already there :)

true....
well
we all know how heavily googles algo is also based on its toolbar
The site of mine however has NOT yet recieved a single hit from google yet even though their toolbar was installed on both machines, too. this tells us that google uses the toolbar to re-rank sites that are already in their db, they don't use it to index new pages though which is a good thing considering I could have posted very sensitive information on that website

A query for domain.com on google returns:
Sorry, no information is available for the URL domain.com

hehe
3 numbers come to my mind
181 :)
outranking me would take less than a week with that pr :)

nuff for today
i'm off right now
bump it or let it die
i don't care :)

Notice these are all Yahoo! properties :)
WG

It was often thought that google tracks by its toolbar but there are many

It was often thought that google tracks by its toolbar but there are many other ways of finding sites without links.Whois is one.registrars listing the sites registered for the day is another.But I guess that the fact its getting traffic suggests that yahoo may be measuring hits a bit like alexa but it could also be Trax's domain name thats helping him rank.Yahoo loves kws in domain.I have a spammy www.best-web-hosting.info Bugger all links and yet ranked no#11 for major kws like web hosting and webhosting and best hosting.So just having kw in domain helps a site rank. I also have www.triple.net.Only one link to it and it became no#1 for a real estate term "triple net lease" its now about #6 even though it now has more links.

i wasted my life smoking pod

Interesting

I used to find that voting for myself with the smilies on the google toolbar used to bring the (old) freshbot around pretty damn quick, sometimes in a matter of minutes/ hours... haven't tried it lately though.

it did?? :)
I read that google said those buttons are dead and would possibly used in an upcoming toolbar version
as far as I know you wasted time clicking those buttons.

interesting thread T :thumbsup

Very interesting thread things that make you go Hmmm

who's the guy on that pic on best-wh?
:winkwink:

but seriously... i know what you're saying yeah... but slurp visited the site way too early to be not refered by the toolbar...
and it makes sense if you ask me ;)

:2 cents: :thumbsup :disgust whois :error :warning

whois alone doesn't bring such results... at least not from what I've experienced so far. if that was the case all my older projects would rank like that but this is not the case... after I switched to firefox with obviously no google toolbar things changed :)

personally i would trust what i know i read in my server logs (this is two years ago) over what you read on a message board, no incoming links to a brand new domain and the only thing i did was click those buttons

pity, you missed out

i'm not stupid.. of course I tried clicking those obvious buttons as well
on brand new sites the effect was obvious: none

well i'm not trying to argue with you... but you could see the packets going out in ethereal... and freshy routinely turned up... anyway...

SEO thing was always interesting...
And that what I read here, is very very interesting :) Im just wondering , how can that happen? Brand new site, w/o inbound links and with 0 traffic ? :) Did you make at least some optimization there ? Keyword optimization, or better to say "on-page optimization" ?
If you did, then probably that's the reason why you're ranked good.

But again, that's weird. As we all know search engines like inbound links!! That's their main KEY to get you ranked pretty high. But as you said, you didn't have any inbound link, which is pretty strange to get listed good.

I'd agree that domain is very good for listing. The best would be if that domain contain some keyword you're aiming to otpimize for. I would like to know, what's your current position on google, and for what keyword ? (if you don't mind sharing that).

About toolbar thing, I am not 100% sure about that. Maybe it's true, but personally I've never tried that. Hmm, maybe that made you good listing :) ?? But I doubt. Also, what's the situation with the Google sandbox ?
Very interesting thread. I would like to hear more optinions from SEO gurus ? What do you say about this subject ?


Good read :thumbsup

you make my initial post sound like a question hehe
this was more like a statement... nothing I wanted to argue about... take it as a fact :)

as far as your google question goes... read the thread before asking questions

I did read the thread :) I just wanted to know something about your site. You'll agree, it's very weird thing to get such a traffic for relative new site, right ?
My questions were pointed just on topic :) How did you make that :) ? There must be some trick, am I right ?

Thanks for the info Trax

no you did not read the thread
I posted what caused those ranks - i don't need to meantion that the sites were highly seod of course
I also said that google did not touch it yet

Yes, I thought so. I did read the thread...And I saw you got the most traffic from yahoo and msn, but as far as I know alogs are are very similar... But yes, that's probably why didn't google still touch it....
Google likes inbound links a lot, and that's the main reason.

you did not read it hehe
a) I never said I recieved traffic from MSN
b) no. yahoo and msn algos are not "very similair" - this is bullshit
i don't want to sound like an ass but you obviously have no real clue about SE's so please don't post comments or assumptions about this topic

VERY VERY VERY interresting thread ! :D

Thanks for that info. I appreciate that tip.
I never considered that.