An Image Search Brings In 17,500 Visitors And HubPages NoFollow Tag Rules

Hi all,

We’ve have a couple of interesting finds in the past few days that I would like to share with you.

Firstly, I happened to see an email come in from hubpages (I use this site a lot in web 2.0 promotion, and suggest you should as well).

If you’ve used it, and signed up for their newsletter, or whatever it is, you get an email from them every now and again.

I usually delete the emails without looking, but this one caught me eye.

Your Hubs have been viewed 24,356 times.

WOW !

A website that we  threw up in January of this year, and have never been back to since had received over 24,000 visitors!

In fact it turned out to be an ordeal to login again, because I have forgotten the details, and it wanted an email address to send the forgotten password to.

And in this game, you burn a heck of a lot of emails. The reason it turned out so hard for me, is that I use a “catch all” domain, so when I register at a web 2.0 site, I can put “anything I want”@nameofdomain.com and the email gets back to me.

Makes it a lot quicker to register, as there is no need to setup a new email account each time (of course it goes without saying that you don’t do it this way all the time, otherwise that’s a footprint).

Anyway, because I used the catch all address, I had to figure out the part I had registered with before the @nameofdomain.com bit. Hubpages wanted the full email address to send me the password.

Sorry..I digress.

Long story short: I eventually found the email, and managed to log into the website.

Here’s the kicker….

Since January 2008, over 24,000 visitors have reached this little hub. It’s a very very simple hub, with about 3 images, 1 video, and a 600 word article. With a couple of links to a money page.

That’s it! Oh and a place for people to leave comments.

No other monetization on the page.

Ready for the shocking confession? It turns out the links to the money pages were not really valid (they pointed to another website I no longer use).

End result: I’ve wasted 24,000 visitors who might have bought something

They had no where to go or nothing to buy from me. Ouch!

I’ve since corrected the problem, and added some adsense to it as well as a trial.

Early this morning, I woke up with a start, suddenly remembering the reason I had set this website up in the first place.

I’d set it up for Images, and specifically getting traffic from people searching for images.

A method that no one seems to use, let alone talk about.

Guess what. The strategy worked, and in fact had been working for many months.

I’d just somehow not added this hub to my excel spreadsheet containing all my websites, when it was originally setup, and because of a silly typo, was not receiving any of the 24,000 visitors hungry clicks!

Here are the incredible statistics.

65% of the traffic was from images.google.com and around 8% from other countries including images.google.ca, images.google.de, and images.google.ie, and images.google.hu !

So around 73% of 24,000 visitors (approx 17,500) made it to the page searching for images! How is that for a traffic strategy?

Of course, some of these people may have just displayed the image in the image search and not actually clicked through to the hub (this would still register as a visit) but early testing seems to indicate a decent percentage are clicking through.

Now you would think these people would not be interested in anything but images, right?

Wrong! In 24 hours, the website has made $15 in adsense.

Now $15 is nothing to write home about, but it tells me that people are finding the image and clicking through to the page, and then happily doing something on the website i.e. clicking my links.

I haven’t had the chance to check google analytics to see how many clicks to my money page have been made, but this is exciting stuff.

If I wanted to be negative about it, I would calculate that we have missed out on approximately 30 x $15 = $450 a month in adsense, or around $4K since January (ouch I guess I did just think about it, it hurts to think of it in those terms). Better not let Anthony know about that stat. Luckily he is off at band practice tonight and hopefully won’t read this post

The real interesting thing to me (and hopefully to you now) is that you can get a healthy number of visitors finding your site when searching for images.

Are you using this strategy? If not, it’s time to look into it, isn’t it?

Of course I’ll be adding this neat little trick to the quick start guide now (and also the hidden little tip on how to get the right text indexed with your image).

You want the traffic to be targeted don’t you?

And this is using hubpages, just wait till I talk to you about the flickr method for images. Pure gold.

It does not get much simpler than this though. Upload a picture, get traffic!

On the subject of hubpages, I’d also like to share this with you.

Specifically, it’s about hubpages and the nofollow tag.

Seems as though something has changed there, and now only certain hubs get dofollow tags, the rest get nofollow tags!

My testing (and asking other people about there experiences) seems to indicate that any hubs with a hub score less than 70 will get nofollow tags. If your hub score is 70 and above, you are good to go and will get dofollow tags, and enjoy the link power.

This is another reason to focus on putting up a decent quality hub and checking back from time to time to update it. May as well give them what they want.

So long as your hub score is 70 or above you are good to go. I tested this today, finding a hub on 69 and it had nofollow tags, and found a few other ones in the 70’s and 80’s and they were all dofollow, so seems to confirm it.

If you have a hub on hubpages, rush off and check it for yourself! If your hub score is less than 70, you have some work to do!

Hope this short little article has been useful to you.

Until next time,

Cheers

Tim