A (swiftly debunked) rumour was going around this week that Google was taking a look at email newsletter statistics (or at least what it could infer from Gmail user behaviour) and applying that data to SEO rankings. The theory was along the lines that if nobody was opening or clicking through your email newsletters, they probably suck, which means your site must suck too, and therefore should be seen as less of an authority on the internet, and ranked accordingly in the search results.
Though it’s not true, it’s pretty trivial to send newsletters from another domain if you’re worried about it being a factor in the future, though as with most SEO advice, working on providing valuable content in every form of communication is probably a better use of your time.
What’s interesting to me is how much Google can influence website publisher’s behaviours, and maybe rightly so, since search traffic is a huge source for many, though I’d caution you to make sure you’re also looking at social, paid, and instructional (telling people to “go here”) traffic sources, among others.
Let me put this another way: in the next 3 years, I fully expect Google to influence fashion through SEO fear. Here’s how:
A rumour will go out that Google’s commissioned a study saying that people who wear red pants are 39.67% less trustworthy. Using their network of satellite photos and Street View images, combined with some trivial facial recognition algorithms tied to profile pictures already on the web (because they’ll continue to fail at social,) Google will be able to identify owners of websites, detect what colour pants they’re wearing, and change search engine rankings accordingly.
In their defence, they’ll tell people that they advise you to wear pants that are valuable to others, and basically follow common pants sense. This will start as an underground rumour, then it’ll break out, then Matt Cutts will debunk it, and this very blog post will have some role, though I’m not sure what (for the record, my pants at the moment are charcoal grey with pinstripes.)
And regardless of the official statement, behaviour, along with pants, will change, all in pursuit of web traffic.
Photo by R/DV/RS
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