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A friend encouraged me to post my experience here. I'd be interested to hear of similar stories.
By way of introduction, I'm the SEO at Women.com. I noticed a trend when I checked my logs earlier this week - a new keyword kept popping up - "Claire Swire".
Who she was and why the interest in her name was a mystery to me.
Then today, I got the answer. Seems there's a scandal in the UK about a women who forwarded a sex joke via email, and the whole thing went viral. See [wired.com...]
Of course, it's not targeted traffic, but it's been fun breaking down why we did so well. I can assume that women.com was coming up on Claire Swire because of references to our online properties for "Marie Claire" and "Women's Wire," but then either the SE's would have had to merge the apostrophe S and Wire to create "swire" or else exclude the "women" from "womenswire.com" Does anyone know which would be more likely? Or perhaps link popularity was the deciding factor? Any ideas?
Also, as you'd expect, there was a large percentage of UK specific engines used, though the percentage may drop as the story spreads.
Like I said, it was an interesting tidbit and on a Friday too ;) The first time something like this happened to me was back in 1998 when Phil Hartman died and we got a flood of traffic to his profile in our celebrity pages. At least that traffic was relevant! Be curious to hear of other experiences and if there is any insights to be learned.
Ted
I used metaeureka, and the SERP shows [metaeureka.com] HotBot, Fast, InfoSeek, and Yahoo pick up your domain on ''swire'' -you actually have slots 2 & 3. Nice job on the SEO, ask for a raise.
I'm picking up some strays on variations of ''banks'' now, as in financial institutions. The site, however, is referencing banks as in shoreline or islands -geography.
BTW, you've also got number 5 on Google - just behind swire.com - and number 6 on MSN!
I'd say the second scenario is what's at work, almost definitely. The space in "Women's Wire" would rule out your first scenario. From what I know SEs just don't merge words across spaces -- unless maybe there also is, somewhere on your site, a typo where that space is omitted?
[google.com...]
I favor the exclusion theory over the typo. Thanks for the responses. This seems like a very professional place to hang out :)
Thanks, just got one :). Though I have much better targeted KW results than this. Swire was a random victory. Since we have no content on the site about her, it's not going to do us much good. Still, when you get unexpected positive results, it's a good way to figure out new patterns.
For personalities in the news, I'd prefer we did better on Condoleezza Rice. She's supposed to be picked for Bush's cabinet next week, and I've been lobbying our editors to avoid using her nickname of Condi. For buzz factor, I think it's too late...
>or else exclude the "women" from "womenswire.com"
Fast has a good advanced search feature, try this search [alltheweb.com], it certainly looks as if FAST is able to "extract" the swire from the URL's.
You'd wait until a big story broke in the news, slap up a page of links to everything else on the net you could find in a half hour about the subject, submit it to Infoseek, and kick back and watch the flood of traffic for a few days. Repeat when the next big story broke.
You can still do that "post haste" to a degree. The big trouble is actually getting the page into an engine in a timely manner. I've got a few out of the way pages about the election that started popping up in the engines early last week from what was submitted in mid novemeber during the hieght of the election hysteria.
Those types of incidents have led me to try and pre-optimize for some crisis oriented words. Sure, you aren't going to nail something like the next flight number of a plane to go down, or know what the next big hanging chad kw will be, but you can plan ahead.
One way I go about it, is to focus on brand names and on the competitions related kw's. For instance, I have a few pages related to machinery and equipment - among many others, one of those pages was dedicated to Firestone tires. During the recent fuss over their tires, I made out like a bandit in the engines. That was probably the best that trick has every worked. When I built those pages, I intentionally built one for Firestone, Goodyear, etc. I just knew sooner or later there would come a time when one of those big companies would be 'in the news'. That is also why I hang onto the Excite forum here. It is about dead, but just watch it be sold or fold in the next six months - we will benefit then from the work now. Just as we gained from the Ink pay-for-play, and the google-yahoo deal, and the workshops...that works everywhere.
I'm not going to lay out the whole thought process on it, but if you spend a hour or two thinking in terms of "crisis" words, or breaking news words and how they can relate to your topic, you can get some of that I won the lottery traffic too. Try to think of the big words that were in the news for your topic during it's last day in the sun "news cycle".
And if you do hit the "numbers" and have another "Claire Swire" pop up, don't hesitate to race in asap and build some content around it. Even if it is just a page full of links to related sites and stories, it can still be a long term benefit as people bookmark your site for later.
