DuckDuckGo adds zero-click recipe search with the Punchfork Recipe API(blog.punchfork.com) |
DuckDuckGo adds zero-click recipe search with the Punchfork Recipe API(blog.punchfork.com) |
She was getting over 15K visits per month -- the site made almost nothing, but we enjoyed creating it together, watching the numbers and responding to emails. And the numbers kept climbing -- at least until a couple of weeks ago.
I noticed the traffic numbers starting to drop. I was wondering why. I thought about digging into it but put it off. Perhaps this new feature at DDG did it? If so, fine with me. They doing a much more awesome job than we did.
The only reason I mention it is because this is the type of question that if you knew enough, you could find the answers in SEO-land. But for a little mom-and-pop site, lots of times you don't have that luxury. You're hot for a few months then suddenly it all dies off and you never know why. You could be adding the best content you can and still all the visitors disappear. No skin off of my back in this particular case, but this has to be frustrating for lots of folks -- especially if your site is a startup instead of something silly like recipes.
Way cool UI! I think we'll add it -- looks like it might be a nice fit.
The website name is also quite a handful to remember ;)
We make maybe 20 bucks a month from the site, and domain renewal is something like 140/year for all the major TLDs, so it's not a high priority right now. The only reason I shared this to try to point out how easy it is to lose traffic and not know why.
If I wanted to chase it, I'd go to SEOMoz and check out the backlinks and competition -- did anything change over the past month? Are other sites getting a bunch of links for some reason?
Thanks for the great tips! We have a Webmaster account on Google. Didn't know there were options also on Bing. Looking at Google Analytics today, we're still at 13K visitors for the previous month, which is about a 20% decline. It's all still search engine traffic, mostly from Google and mostly for "tater tot casserole" Go figure. Is tater tot casserole so popular? Why? These kinds of questions drive you crazy, because many times when you make a site for your startup or topic -- especially if it has a lot of pages, you get all this data from web analytics and it's a bitch trying to make some kind of meaning out of it.
Folks are still spending on average more than a minute on the site, which means they are taking time to read the recipes and get some value. That's all that counts for us.
BTW, if any of you startup guys want to go into recipes, good luck. She has had this site, with lots of traffic, for a couple of years now, and hell if we can figure out how to monetize it. We did books, kitchenware, magazines, AdSense -- finally writing our own ebook. Right now we're thinking about coupons or some other giveaway product, but I don't have my hopes up. Recipes, at least to me, looks like an income-free zone. One of the reasons we did the ebook was to provide a totally ad-free place to keep track of recipes. We're operating under the principle that people who are cooking hamburger casseroles probably aren't needing anything else at all, at least at the moment they're online.
Still, we did it to make something people want that can scale, so no matter how it turns out, we helped people (as evidenced by our emails and traffic stats) and we can learn something from it.
I'm not sure exactly what your business is (a one-man Demand Media?), but it's getting old fast.
Nice little touch.
!hackernews which leads to a hnsearch.com search results!
I've been using it as my default search engine for about 2/3 weeks now and its been unnoticeable (in a good way)
Anybody can create commands.
It's a hidden gem, and I love it.
[1]: http://yubnub.org
Or has "duck" another (search related) meaning in english that I'm not aware of?
As for duck.com, see https://duck.co/topic/duck-com-redirects-to-google
Click on one of the recipes in the Punchfork results:
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=mojito+recipe
Jeff is doing an amazing job with Punchfork and this is a great addition.
I hope you mean web hosting.
//edit: Ah you mean for the .com + .org + .net etc. Still can't see this being 140 but makes more sense