Falling out with Alexa and making friends with Google - write as if your steem life depended on it...
One of the side effects of doing the daily Steem News is that I do check out the main statistics for Steem and Steemit.com everyday.
Some of the stats are good - like the growth in Dolphins and Orcas.
But some are bad. I'm not talking price - that's a different issue.
What is worrying me most is the Alexa rank of steemit.com and the daily traffic figures.
When I started recording the figures for the news posts right at the end of December last year steemit.com was ranked on Alexa just below #4000.
I don't have the stats to hand but I think it was early 2018 that Steemit.com was riding high in the top 1000 sites of the world according to Alexa.com.
Today Steemit.com has just dropped below #7000.
The Alexa ranking reflects the visitor numbers and page views on the site.
I don't have access to the Google Analytics for the site, but I do track for the news posts the figures from hypestat.com.
When I started recording the figures on 10 February steemit.com had 253,580 unique visitors per day and 775,954 page views.
As of today those figures have fallen to 184,943 unique visitors and 458,658 page views. That is a decrease of approximately 17% in visitors and 41% in page views - in 7 months.
Of course, the price of STEEM impacts traffic, the growth in for example Steempeak offsets some of the drops etc etc.
The bottom line is that there are less people visiting Steem. Less people means less eyeballs. Which in turn means less advertising revenue. Less ad revenue will likely mean more programmatic STEEM selling by Steemit Inc...
There are fewer people writing fewer posts for sure.
But it may not just be about quantity. I am pretty sure 'substance' comes into play too.
Most of the page views on Steem likely come in from organic searches on Google & Co.
That I suspect is where the problem lies. We are producing less content that Google will index highly.
Many posts I see have too few words, are not well structured and don't cover subject matter that people are searching for on Google.
Although there is some great content produced on Steem, there is not enough of it, and we don't cover a broad enough range of subjects in any 'authorative' sort of fashion.
We need to start writing again as if our Steem price depended on it.
I am sure I am as guilty as the next person here.
Many of my posts are about Steem. Not a topic that will bring the masses Googling towards us.
But I have seen the light and I will reform my ways.
I am going to start writing posts for the wider world.
First up I am going to build on a review of an organic restaurant I went to recently and start compiling 'An Organic Guide to Wales'.
This won't be earth shattering, ground breaking or have mass appeal.
But I hope it will have substance, authority, originality and be super attractive to a small niche Google searching audience.
I will also do my best to push it out on social media to bring more eyes to steem.
My big plan and my big hope with projects like is that steem becomes a frontline source of information, rather than a rather unknown social crypto project.
Other people like @thecryptodrive, @justineh and @paulag have been posting similar thoughts recently.
This is my personal take on the issue and what I hope I can do to help.
In the words of the SEO experts I believe we need to go longtail and evergreen. Maybe @kay-leclerc can correct me on this if I've got my terminology mixed up.
So let's get writing. Writing with passion. Writing with purpose.
Write about what the world wants to know about.
And let them read it on Steem.
[ image from rawpixel on pixabay.com ]
A big reason steemit is falling off the alexa wagon is because no one in their right mind is posting with that clunky old dinosaur. I stopped using steemit about one year ago and do not regret it one bit.
I post on dApps that have beautiful interfaces and pay me with upvotes when I use them.
When I came here 2 years ago, steemit's alexa ranking was one of the selling points. I thought it would help with my weight loss work. This is my original reason for being on social media at all.
Thanks to the STEEM blockchain, I post on many more niche topics now and have great places set up to do that work.
I use steempeak and steemworld for admin activities. I post and/or interact with busy, esteem, dPoll, dLike, partiko, dtube, nTopaz, tasteem, steemhunt, travelfeed, 3speak, on and on we go.
STEEM has fantastic dApps and steemit is not one of them. I write minnow tips and the first thing I tell people is to stop posting with steemit if they even are when they get here now. I cannot think of one good thing to say about the place except that they were the pioneer who got us started. Like IBM fell to Apple and Microsoft, steemit will some day only be a memory. It cannot happen soon enough.
Check the alexas for the GOOD dApps. They are not where steemit used to be, but they are rising. We are decentralized, and so each dApp is different..
And don't even mention how bad steemit looks to newcomers, I refer nobody from the outside there at all. Check @jaynie's recent post on that topic. On top of looking like a site from 2014, the first impression is dismal in every way. I refer people with steempeak or busy for best results. Others use other dApps, but it will take time to turn this ship.
Steempeak is definitely showing good growth on Alexa.
It will be interesting to follow how traffic grows on other apps and the new tribe sites.
The immediate issue affecting all of us is that it is steemit.com that Steemit Inc is selling advertising on.
And that ad revenue is needed to reduce their need to sell STEEM, which should in theory help the price of STEEM.
Hopefully at some point soon steemit.com will be given a serious makeover and uplift reflecting its role as a flagship interface for the steem blockchain.
You can look at the alexa for all of the dApps. All those I have checked are growing now.
I have ad-blocker on all my browsers as many do. I cannot help them out of the hole they dug since I never use them. The presence of the ads is one of the topics on @jaynie's post.
It's hard enough to get new people to start here without telling them to go to the worst dApp we have and click ads. Maybe the whales and orcas can take that on as a project, but new users have no time for such nonsense.
Ergh.... I'm hoping for a unicorn myself.
They had their chance and they blew it. Go to the other dApps to see the excellence currently available on the STEEM blockchain. Push those and then we will really have something.
Maybe it is a good thing that steemit inc is selling off? We don't like $0.15 steem, but eventually they will be out of steem to sell, and the redistribution will be done, and then we can climb steadily from there.
one of the biggest problem with Alexa and a blockchain ecosystem like Steem is that it has no way of detecting and then presenting data on the actual platform which would tell more of a story than if people are visiting one entry point.
My suspicion is that as blockchains become more mainstream, Alexa is the one which will need to adapt or become a new myspace.
As for Steemit.com, it is my preferred site. It's simple straightforward and has all I need. All my content is prepared offline, the only thing a frontend like Steempeak gives me is the ability to add 5 more tags.
With the only the very crude data we have available it is difficult to draw any insightful conclusions. Would need full Google Analytics to go more into this.
A very useful metric would be somehow to track aggregated traffic across all the Steem blockchain interfaces. That would give a much better picture.
100% agreed. I have been doing so much work on seo on @theexcelclub stuff because its my own site. the results I have seen on my own site are fantastic and we can do the same here on steem. its not just about longtail and evergreen, its also about social shares, comments, backlinks. we need to write great searchable content and share it with the rest of the world.
Yes, definitely social sharing as well. Although, apart from a small Twitter account, I am not really active on other social media. I will need to up my game on that.
You may well have already posted about this, but it would be interesting to read more about what you have learnt and are continuing to learn about structuring content on Steem and how to promote it for maximum 'attractive effect' to draw people in.
It would be interesting to explore ways to reward steemians who manage to bring people into steem through sharing their content on social media.
I am sure I saw someone talking about that recently but can't recall who? Maybe @steempress or @acidyo for OCD?
last i hear, we need more curator than content creator .
If steemit going to depend on ads revenue than content creator is more important than curator.
To generate view, you need to give the consumer something.
With the content creator profit cut by half, do you think people will still want to post here?
I wonder how google is handling the duplicate content? I write on busy. I haven't visited steemit in months. But, with the tribes now we have the same post on many different sites. That can't be good.
One thought is to write beginner tutorials on steemit. That way when people are looking up "How To's " to help them learn steemit those articles should rank and receive traffic.
The duplicate content issue is one that needs to be explored more fully.
Overlooked in all this is the fact that most do not use Steemit.com especially with the introduction of the tribes.
For example, I am posting this comment from Steemleo directly. I personally do not do anything on Steemit.com.
I not only use busy and Steempeak but I also post/vote directly on Steemeleo, stemgeeks, and palnet.
Add in the other applications and it is easy to see that Steemit.com is no longer the choice app for most.
But the content still appears on steemit.com.
And with 180K+ daily unique visitors it is clear most will be organic search engine traffic.
It will be interesting to see how the stats grow for each of the tribe sites.
Hopefully tribes will be able to make the figures public.
it appears on STeemit and the other frontends but Alexa only notices when the content is accessed through Steemit.com
The issue here is one of "canonical URL"; the originating website of a post. This has been discussed a few times within the Leo chatroom because it was noticed that steemit.com is claiming as canonical posts that do not originate from its own site.
This should be of concern to all platforms and to tribe websites. The setting is placed in the post header and the webmaster must know how the setting works and what to do about ensuring it retains canonical status if a post originates from somewhere other than steemit.
Google is not the dumbest company on the planet and can tell the difference between theft and article farms (lol) and, if there are conflicts between the canonical status of a post it will use other metrics.
I also noted that even if an article is posted from a tribe site, the timestamp of the Steemit "copy" is 3 seconds before it appears on the tribe site.
These are all issues that a webmaster should be aware of.
My point was that Alexa is not seeing the post appear on Steemit.com .. it's seeing and tracking the visitors ... so when people visit the other frontends that shows increased visitors to that frontend which is a corresponding decrease to Steemit.com
I don't consider that a bad thing because the ecosystem is the traffic that really matters and those other frontends are just access points as well.
So, seeing a drop in steemit.com's Alexa ranking is not an indication of Steem's decline when the other frontends rankings are climbing. It's more an indication of the distribution of attention across the ecosystem.
True, but is the opposite of what I replied to ;-)
Organic growth of visitors to the tribes is good, but those coming from a search engine are likely to be directed to the steemit version of an article, even if not the originating platform - and that has to do with what is considered the canonical url.
Do you think the distribution to the other front ends will impact on the potential advertising revenue from steemit.com?
I wonder if some shared ad revenue model needs to be explored?
Yes, but good luck with the "sharing" model - I suspect tribes and platforms are now very obviously in competition.
I suspect the opposite, and that tribes need to find ways of actually being communities and not just post-tags with potentially zero actual participation - and zero eyeball count.
I would definitely agree on that. Beginning to explore that in conversations with tribe owners on my new MSP show - TRIBE.talk that started yesterday.
That is very interesting. The issue of the canonical URL will be ever more important for tribes to pull in new users of their content via organic search engines.
I wonder where this needs to go to be explored and optimised...
I was told that steempress have long had a delay between publishing to the internet and then to the steem blockchain, precisely to allow their URL to propagate.
Perhaps tribes need to look into something similar, perhaps with an edit-lock for however many seconds it takes to broadcast their canonical url.
I wonder if a new aggregator would be a good idea. One that shows the originating website of each post, say with the tribe or platform logo in a corner. :-)
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
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Maybe google is punishing steemit for duplicate content? I mean, steem tribes, busy, steempeak ... use the same content and google doesn't like it!
That's an interesting idea.... esp with people who make sure to use all 10 tags to maximize tribe earnings.
Please see the reply I made earlier :-)
One issue is not so much being punished, but that now having multiple platforms means those platforms are actually in competition as far as Google is concerned.
Got to be a large part in due to steempeak.
I have now added @steempeak's numbers to my daily Steem News posts to track.
gREAT READ MAN! SHARED!
Thank you.
This is one of the primary reasons that I have been publishing my #rsslog series of posts since about March or April. It's regular and timely content with predictable and consistent quality, and I'm sending links out from here to bloggers and publishers all over the Internet, who - hopefully - will sometimes have their curiosity piqued when they see steempeak.com in their traffic logs.