SEO value of a 'Most Popular Stories' widget?
-
Hi there,
I work for a theater and live performances publishing site. We write 15-20 quality articles per day on the New York City and national theater community.
We show a "Most Read" stories widget on all of our pages, but click rates for these are really low - 1% of readers click to read a story from this.
As such we're considering replacing this with higher-value content.
My question, however, is this: Is there any SEO value in keeping this widget? I want to make sure we're taking this aspect into consideration.
Thank you!
-
At Moz, we've considered using one to better serve our content. Many allow you to "buy out" the ads and only show your own content.
-
For small brands, most definitely yes. But ESPN uses Outbrain and I don't think it damages their credibility or brand.
-
If you are referring to the "stinky" nature of these ads, then my personal opinion is "yes". Although, I have not seen any formal studies where someone devised tests to determine the impact upon the brand. I don't run them on my site because I think that they can damage the credibility of my content when those types of ads are adjacent to it. So, instead, I promote my own content, hoping to earn additional pageviews and the income from other forms of advertising that will come with those pageviews.
-
Is there any evidence that using Taboola, Outbrain, etc., style ads negatively affect the host brand, causing said host brand to lose future visitors?
-
but click rates for these are really low - 1% of readers click to read a story from this.
"Most popular stories" widgets are usually really valuable. Don't replace the widget until you test a better version.
If you go to some of the big news sites, at the bottom of articles you will see the content marketing ads run by Taboola, Outbrain, ContentAd, Gravity and Adblade. These have big, juicy, provocative images and quite honestly, they are a bit stinky. However, you can learn something from them. Learn their format and try a widget with very attractive images about your articles, with a caption that elicits clicks. I think that you will get more than one percent click rate.
IF "Most popular stories" does not work then try "Related Stories"..... Really nice images are very important for these to succeed, but they can succeed spectacularly if you have the right kind of image and content that catches the visitor's desire for more.
Look at the Gravity ads on the bottom of this Forbes article.
ADDED: Since you are a news site, you might make a "most recent" widget because people are looking for the fresh news.
Something important about running "most popular" and "related stories" widgets. If you have them on a page that is sleepy content or uninspiring the visitor might not be motivated to click your widget because they expect to find "more of the same". Including sleepy or uninspiring content in the widget will assure that it will not be clicked. Good images and spectacular images can perform very differently. Strive to have spectacular images.
Also, the widgets need to be updated frequently. If you have lots of returning visitors, if they have already seen your widget and clicked the interesting items, showing that same widget over and over again will produce worse results. We update our widgets several times per hour with all different content.
-
As the widget is on each page of your site, it is generating a lot of internal links to these articles. If these articles have value for search, it could help them to get better positions.
On the other side, widgets like these are very ofter positioned in the same column as advertising, newsletter subscriptionboxes, ...etc - so I am not sure if Google attributes the same value to these links as to the links which are really embedded/integrated in your content.
If you can replace it by higher value content I would do it - but you'll have to make sure that the new content has indeed a higher value for your visits (try some A/B testing and check vitals stats like bouncerate, avg time on site, pageviews/visit, clickrates,..)
Hope this helps,
Dirk
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My DA hasn't changed in over a year
My DA has been stuck at 32 for over a year, despite me producing lots of new, relevant content for my site and getting many high-quality backlinks from decent websites. Both my keywords and link profile have grown... but DA has not. I know these things take time, but I've watched competitors climb from low DA to now higher than me in a year, and I have no clue why I haven't grown too. I'm not entirely sure what to do next. Moz says I don't have any crawler issues, so I assume it's seeing my site ok. Any advice, clues, ideas very welcome. Thanks
Link Building | | WanderingBird0 -
SEO and PR
In the home improvement industry (windows, doors and conservatories) what is the best approach with regard to PR in order to build quality links. It's a lot easier if you are selling a computer, mirror, widget etc as you have an actual product that you can send magazines,bloggers, journalists to review/feature for inclusion in their publications. It's a lot more difficult if you are a builder, double glazing installer etc to get this PR coverage as you have nothing to send them to review, feature etc. What approach do the experts on the forum think that would work best in the double glazing industry to secure coverage across publications both online and offline?
Link Building | | ocelot0 -
Do inbound links to download .exe files improve SEO?
The site, (http://www.bartenderbarcodesoftware.com/) sells barcode software. They also provide free printer drivers on their site. During a recent domain change (before I started helping them), they began looking at their inbound links and found quite a few external sites linking to these download files. However, when someone clicks on the link on one of these sites (i.e. http://vvs-motor.com.ua/barcode-printer-drivers) it immediately begins downloading the file (i.e. http://www.seagullscientific.com/downloads/drivers/archive/7.2/7.2.4/Unimark_7.2.4.exe) without taking the visitor to the site. The owner would greatly prefer this traffic to engage with the site and is considering 301 redirecting those download links to an actual webpage. Question: Would this look suspicious to Google? Would this have a positive or negative effect on SEO? The last factor to consider is that many of these sites will likely just recreate the list based on the new links at some future point. Thanks for any help!
Link Building | | motosantiago0 -
Does using "pring2web" hurt SEO?
I've never really seen this before but one of my clients has 4000+ links from Print2Web. Their rankings are falling back a bit but I'm wondering if this is part of the problem. They don't seem to say their service is about SEO so I'm not so sure this is counted as spam or not. The main concern is that the next closest number of links from one site is only 97. Has anyone heard of this service? Can someone tell me from experience if using this service has hurt SEO efforts? Thanks!
Link Building | | BenRWoodard1 -
Are reciprocal links of any value today?
Does anyone still use the reciprocal link exchange technique and is it of any value?
Link Building | | SEOwins0 -
How to do SEO for catalog websites?
Hi, I am just start to build 10 wordpress based ecommerce website cataloges. It is optimised and quick, but what should I do more? Link building? Build relevant category structure and start to register websites? I know both of them has to be unique. Thanks! Best regards,
Link Building | | Netkreativ
Misi0 -
My client's first press release...what to do?
My client is in the clothing, apparel tshirt industry geared toward a specific music icon. They have a few competitors, my spider senses tell me I will be able to get them great SERP standing, and place them in a very competitive position. Their company has been around for a while but has never written a press release. I had them craft a PR on the subject of cotton prices and how it has affected their business. A local paper will pick this up no prob. Where is the best place to go? It is not like it is breaking news, I dont want duplicate content, and I need an experts advice. I will provide more details if needed. Thank Mozzers!
Link Building | | Giggy1 -
SEO Tool to search mass URLs (for link qualification)
Hi, I have been using OSE and have a compiled list of backlinks to my competitor's sites. The next step would be to go through and qualify all of these links for a link opportunities for my client's site. To save me a lot of time, I require a tool that will search all of these pages (say 1000) for specific keywords in tags or body content. A search query might be - site:(URL list) intitle:directory site:(URL list) "add site" etc Any ideas would be great. Thanks.
Link Building | | DigitalLeaf0