Hello!
This is SEM: your daily SEO inspiration, where I curate/summarize one valuable item related to SEO and send it your way M-F.
Today’s Story:
Patrick Stox @ Ahrefs set out to find an answer to the question “does going viral help with SEO?”
The answer he found: nah...ish.
Patrick looked at several sites that got mega viral traffic (like the Four Seasons Total Landscaping website in Philly LOL) to see how things went for their rankings. He sums up his research like this:
I found that going viral helps with their rankings a bit, but not as much as you may expect.
The overall point he makes here is that most of the links from going viral come to the site linking to the homepage with mostly brand-related anchor text, and that aside from a short-term or brand-focused bump in traffic or rankings, mostly the traffic doesn’t see sustained growth.
An example from GravityPayments.com (the ultra feel-good-newsworthy about a CEO taking a pay cut to pay his employees more) which got repeated coverage over time—and not always for positive reasons:
You can see that referring domains increase while traffic does not…
My Thoughts:
Perhaps there’s a lot to be said for the value of topically relevant links. Also, based on the example provided in the Four Seasons Total Landscaping example (they eventually moved their merch to another site, pages that were getting an absolute shitload of links to, but never redirected the pages, they are just “not found,”) maybe not all of the sites are working with a good SEO team—or any SEO team at ALL, and maybe that’s something that not even an influx of high authority PR links can overcome.
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That’s it for today’s newsletter. Check out some of my current favorite resources/tools:
Resources And Recommendations
Traffic Think Tank (SEO community):
🎓 a very high quality paid Slack community (recently acquired by SEM Rush) with an extensive library of SEO lessons taught by some of the industry’s smartest people. Sign up here. (aff link)
Content At Scale (AI content engine):
🦾 one of the best AI content generators, they’ve built a few additional layers of NLP on top of the direct AI output to create pretty solid push-button articles (though I’d still recommend an editing pass or three). Get 20% more credit by signing up through this (aff) link.
Smash Digital (link building):
🔗 I used to work at Smash—and still write a monthly SEO column for them, so I know first hand the high quality links they can build. For serious businesses only, check them out here (and tell them I sent you).
A Weekly(ish) Longform SEO Newsletter:
📖 It’s me, I’m the weekly-ish writer. Check out my newsletter, Rank Theory, for "emerging theories, illuminating experiments, and occasional shitposting."
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Thanks for reading!
Until tomorrow…
Sean Markey
sem@seanmarkey.com
PS — LMK what you thought of this quick SEO email. Good? Bad? Magically Delicious? I’d love to hear from you.
PPS — if you see something interesting that you want me to cover (or you are just trying to get more readers on your SEO article—IDC as long as its good) feel free to send me tips/tricks/articles you’d like to see me write about.