I should know a lot about how this works, so being surprised that it does find my content is a surprise — sometimes.
For those of you who have browsed content on www.insidespin.com, you may have noticed that not all the articles are fully fleshed out. When a reader comes to an article where only the abstract is written, the site will record the attempt to open the detail page and ask the reader if they want to make a special request to prioritize that article over others. I often use the database stats to help me determine where the biggest unpublished holes are on the site — effectively causing me to publish on demand, an idea I picked up in the early 90’s from a work colleague of mine at Fulcrum.
If a reader does trigger the email, I often email the reader back to find out how they found insidespin.com and also what other articles are of interest. I received such a request today and much to my surprise, a fairly general type of query (“channel system integrators”) brought insidespin.com content to the 4th item on the first search result page for this reader — much to my surprise.
My neighbour reminded me that companies pay lots of money to get their content to the first page of a google search, not sure how I managed it without spending a penny. Perhaps good content? Maybe the density of content on the target page highly correlates with the query phrase — anyway, it was a surprise to find insidespin.com appearing so high on the result list.
Perhaps I should write more of the missing articles and site popularity will increase accordingly. I’m approaching 100,000 articles viewed over about a three year period. What a surprise.