Reciprocal Traffic and the ‘Jump’
I use the StumbleUpon firefox plugin to try and find those ‘gold nugget’ webpages in things I am interested in. One of those things happens to be (surprise!) technology. Now, probably two out of every 5 sites is some ’search engine optimization’ or ‘how to improve your blog’ blog post that offers zero-science techniques for improving your pagerank and increasing traffic.
As far as I can tell, the only people these posts appeal to are other bloggers. So the traffic these sites are attracting are bloggers, who implement the changes, who then attract the bloggers they got the idea from. All I see here is a bunch of reciprocal traffic. Kudos, blogger. Your site is a raging success among other bloggers doing the exact same thing you are.
And as far as techniques used, who invented the ‘insert advertisement in the middle of an article’ technique? And furthermore, who was the idiot that decided to call it a ‘jump’? It is not a jump, it is an advertisement in the middle of your content. I strongly believe the concept was the result of a blogger angry that the blink tag they were so fond of is no longer supported in most browsers. “Hey, I can’t annoy people with blinking text. Time to come up with something new.” Viola, the ‘jump’ is born. Bloggers: if I think your content is good, I’ll probably keep reading despite the annoyance (yay adblock). But if your content isn’t fantastic and I see the word ‘jump’ in your post, I’m leaving your site and am likely to never return.
Stop being silly.
All of you. I mean it. You are ruining my StumbleUpon experience.
