The SEO value of content production volume confirmed!

While running Famplosion, I had a sneaking suspicion that the volume of content we added had a direct impact on the traffic we’d get to our site.  Initially, the traffic spikes per content submission volume spikes would happen on about a 2 to 3 day delay.  I guessed this was due to the infrequency of getting indexed by the googlebot when we were first getting started.  The Googlebot did not come around as regularly to reindex us.  Then in time, that dropped to a one day delay once the Googlebot was indexing us essentially every day.

Seeing the correlation I had to ask whether my hunch about causation was true.  I definitely got some basic experience in asking that question around holidays when my Editors would take a few days off.  We’d see dips in traffic correspondingly.  However, I couldn’t know for certain that these dips were not reflections of our audience’s behavior moreso than an algorithmic issue derived from reduced content submission volume.

Well, my suspicions have been confirmed by a new report put out by the folks at Changing Content.  They ran as scientific an inquiry as I’ve seen in this area to determine the true value of changing content.  It’s a very interesting report you can get here!

Also, we used to get content from a variety of sources for Famplosion.  Some sources we subscribed to spewed the same content to sites all over the web.  I had a hunch the SEO value of this content was less than the SEO value of content my Editors would contribute manually.  This was important stuff for me to know because the “cost per content” metric was one I used to measure our operation all the time.  I basically needed to know whether the high cost of human edited content was valuable enough to justify the expense when compared to the less expensive subscription services that were more parsed through tons of scripts before getting published on our site.  My hypothesis was that the human contributed content (being more specifically relevant to our site’s audience) had a great enough SEO value to justify the high cost-per-content when compared to the content that we subscribed to along with everyone else out there.

So that leads me to something else I think I really like about the Changing Content widget offering.  The content they provide in their little tool for their clients is human edited!  As far as I’m concerned, that makes a huge difference, which I would LOVE to see quantified relative to crawled/indexed/parsed content.

I guess the more my intuition is validated by a scientific method, the better I feel about myself….hmm, all sorts of theological implications in that statement…will have to think that through.

Regardless, check out Changing Content when you get a chance.  Looks like a very cool tool.

And hats off to Jason Cohen, whose blog is where I first read about this tool!