SEO value of a 'Most Popular Stories' widget?

[TheaterMania]

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!

[EricaMcGillivray]

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.

[MattAntonino]

For small brands, most definitely yes.  But ESPN uses Outbrain and I don't think it damages their credibility or brand.

[EGOL]

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.

[TheaterMania]

Is there any evidence that using Taboola, Outbrain, etc., style ads negatively affect the host brand, causing said host brand to lose future visitors?

[EGOL]

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.

[DirkC]

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