Dragonfly Media Curacao

Two weeks ago we posted about our efforts for getting some pages out of Google’s supplemental index. The theory was that pages that have gone into supplemental are not getting enough internal link love. This theory was backed by material from Michael Martinez, Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin so we were pretty confident that this would work, but you’re never sure in SEO.

We decided to use a Wordpress plugin called popularity contest to display a list of most visited posts on every page in the blog. As a result of using this plugin every page on the blog would add a link to the ten most popular posts in the blog. This means that those most popular pages would get link love from about 100 sources and every new page would add another link.

Besides the fact that this would be pretty useful for those pages, it is also a very democratic way of giving link love. Only the top ten most popular pages in terms of visits, comments and pingbacks get the added link love. If people are not interested in a post then it’s Google hell for that post!

For the past two weeks we have kept an eye on the results of the plugin and we got some unexpected results. Some of the posts that weren’t very popular in the amount of views they got were rising rapidly because it looked like they had a lot of comments. When looking at the posts we saw that they didn’t have any comments.

It turned out that the plugin also counted comment spam as legit comments, even though the spam was caught by Akismet. The first time we found this, we went into the database and edited the database manually. You can imagine that’s not something you want to do regularly. After some research we found out that Alex King had added a button in the options to do exactly what we had been doing manually….. Yeah, we felt stupid at that moment. Don’t rub it in, please.

Ok, the plugin was working, we added a lot of internal links to popular posts in one fell swoop and got red-faced in the process. But did it work? The goal was to get, at least, our post about boo.com and our post about promoting websites on curacao out of the supplemental index. The answer is “yes, it worked” as you can see here and here. NB: the first in the search engine results for the boo.com article is the comment feed which is still supplemental, but that’s ok.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 7:23 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.