Comments on Faves.com Blog: 1 Million Page Views | What are they doing?

Mike and team, Blue Dot is such a great way to com...

2007-08-15T22:45:00.000-07:00

Mike and team,

Blue Dot is such a great way to commumicate with workshops, and research for projects. Congrats on the 1 million page views...it will continue to grow. Personally I like the private feature and being able to share dots purposely.

Bonnie

Mike:Thanks for the detailed response, I appreciat...

2007-08-13T23:53:00.000-07:00

Mike:
Thanks for the detailed response, I appreciate it. That Googlebot crawling must translate to much bandwidth chewed up and higher hosting bills - ouch! :(

@anonOh, yes - and Google is about 90% of our SE t...

2007-08-13T13:53:00.000-07:00

@anon

Oh, yes - and Google is about 90% of our SE traffic. In fact, Google Japan dominates even Yahoo and MSN search.

One thing I note is that Google just does a better job of indexing. We get over 3 million page views per week from Google's crawler. So they are doing an excellent job of sorting through all the new content in a very timely manner. the other search engines are barely on the radar in comparison.

I hear the same thing from other web startups I've talked to as well.

@anon (BTW - can you identify yourself - it would...

2007-08-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

@anon (BTW - can you identify yourself - it would be nice to know who I'm "talking" to).

75% of our traffic is SE-driven. So, yes, we have a HUGE dependency on search engines (and Google in particular).

The reason I'm not scared, is that I think it remains in Google's interest to continue to drive traffic to our site. There is not a good reason for them to stop, and they benefit by being our Ad provider on our site as well.

Sites like Blue Dot are unique in that they give voice to a whole new class of user - the web READER. In that past, Google could only rank pages based on what PUBLISHERS thought about web sites. We actually provide something that even blogs don't do that well - measure the pulse of the internet audience to determine what they find as the most appealing content.

We further validate real users from "link spammers" by taking measures to sandbox users until we think they are authentic (you'll note that new users's links are "nofollow" until they are out of the sandbox). We also agressively delete user accounts of obvious link spammers.

Since we are still a fairly small site, by Internet standards, we are not yet being given traffic for the most competitive keywords; so we find that most of our traffic comes from either breaking news type searches or more "long tail" queries.

In as much as our users make comments about the quality of web sites, we provide information you can't get through more traditional web sites.

The profiles are popular, I think, because Google thinks those are the most relevant pages for searches to land; they also demonstrate popularity by the number of friends you have on Blue Dot as friend pages are cross-linked to each other.

Hi Mike - thanks for following-up!Could you please...

2007-08-12T05:22:00.000-07:00

Hi Mike - thanks for following-up!
Could you please explain why you are not afraid of such a large dependency on SEs? Google & friends change how they index pages, how they boost or deboost them pretty regularly, so if you start showing up below the fold or on page 2, your traffic is gone, no?

Of course, I understand that the goal is always to take these random visitors and convert them into regular users.

But look at my previous comment, please. I looked at users' profiles on Bluedot and don't see what attracts people to those profiles. Do you know what makes profiles so attractive?

Finally, out of curiosity, out of the total SE traffic, what percentage is Google? Over 50%?

I look forward to you answers!
Many thanks!

@anon. I don't think our SE traffic is going away...

2007-08-11T01:27:00.000-07:00

@anon. I don't think our SE traffic is going away any time soon. If anything, it's a challenge we're rising to to try to show this audience that there is more on Blue Dot than just their search landing page. Our goal is convert these folks to repeat users.

Mike: thanks for sharing this info! That's a big ...

2007-08-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

Mike: thanks for sharing this info! That's a big SE dependency there. Aren't you scared?

Also, why do you think people spend so much time on user profiles? The latest dots? Tags? Or maybe that friends box with thumbnail images?

@gloria: That's what I love to hear! We're trying...

2007-08-07T10:18:00.000-07:00

@gloria: That's what I love to hear! We're trying to make Blue Dot more attractive to people who find us via Search so that they will stick around and become regular contributors in the Blue Dot party!

I'm one who stumbled into Blue Dot on a search mis...

2007-08-06T23:11:00.000-07:00

I'm one who stumbled into Blue Dot on a search mission and stayed. I love my dots! And my 'friends' dot. Thanks, BD

Congrats on the big number.

2007-08-06T20:47:00.000-07:00

Congrats on the big number.

Nice!

2007-08-06T20:08:00.000-07:00

Nice!