Widgetbait Gone Wild talks about using widgets to build links back to dating sites. Matthew Inman did this for his site, JustSayHi, and Google spanked him big time for inappropriate linkbaiting.
Some of you might remember I left SEOmoz last year to join up with JustSayHi with the intention of creating the world’s biggest, baddest free online dating site. Using these quizzes, I had a creative way to rank our site for competitive keywords in an industry that is primarily dominated by paid links, directory spam, and other greyish-black SEO tactics. We ranked #1 for online dating, free online dating, and numerous other very competitive terms. We were averaging over 2,000 new members a day and passed the 500,000 member mark.
Here’s what these less than savory online marketing tactics will do to your monthly visitor traffic.
A nice trend line, but at what cost? The JustSayHi numbers are not going to have PlentyOfFish worried, but still pretty respectable traffic, if not the way it was acquired. Too bad Matthew didn’t read this blog, he would have reconsidered his approach and perhaps not have gone through so much wasted energy. Then again, I’m not an SEO wizard, but a more reasoned approach to traffic driving might have grown the site similarly without all the hassle.
Starting a free dating site that’s not a niche is not a very good idea these days but alas, people will continue to try and get rich quick, and fail, as is often the case when people that know little about online dating, or people in general, get into the game.
I’m not commenting on anyone in particular, but the online dating space is full of unsavory characters that run dating sites that make a lot of money. Same goes for matchmakers. I’m trying to give up being frustrated about the misalignment between soul, intent and bank account, it’s difficult. We haven’t even begun to see the end of opportunists that barrage us with poorly designed sites, un-targeted advertising, black-hat SEO and no customer service.
Ok, rant over. Google penalized JustSayHi, Matt Cutts got into the conversation, and Matthew, realizing he screwed up royally, started over with a new domain name, OnePlusYou.
Matthew says they are going to be “as 100% squeaky clean as we could and do our best to stay within Google’s guidelines.” However, within a few weeks, Google wrote to tell OnePlusYou that they were up to “the same off-topic widget tricks all over again on another site.”
The new OnePlusYou site launches soon, we’ll be keeping an eye on it to see how it performs in the coming months.
Here’s the link to the Guardian article about Matthew Inman.
While thinking about white and black-hat SEO, I dug up some numbers of interest. Check out the monthly visitor graph and traffic-driving keywords for three popular dating sites. SinglesNet has 4,714 keywords , Mate1 has 827 and PlentyOfFish 7,211 has keywords. Interesting that SinglesNet has less keywords working for them yet 13M more monthly visits per month. What is driving the additional traffic?
As I spend time paying attention to dating site SEO practices, I’m becoming more and more concerned at how the customer is being left behind at the altar of conversion metrics and monthly visits. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive, just sayin.
