Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Relevant similar story: I had this site for years, http://paycheck-stub.com

Developed it back when I was doing microsites, and I wasn't really sure what to do with it. My main question: why do people visit, anyway? I figured I'd know what to do with it once I figured out why people were there.

So I did just what these guys did. I created a list of buttons down the page with all the possible things people visiting a site called paycheck stub might want. Hooked them all into Google Analytics. Paycheck templates? Fake paychecks? Loans? Payroll services? A job? Sample paychecks for school or presentations?

Very interesting results. First, about 90% didn't want any of that. God knows why they were there. But out of the other 10%, I got a couple pieces of useful information. They were looking for payroll services. So I put up some banner ads. (I think I took down the Adsense. Can't remember)

That, in turn, provided more ad revenue than simply using Adsense on the site. It also provided me with a list of topics to develop and some search terms to try to hit.

So I developed those topics and tried to do better on those search terms. At one point I was almost ready to jump into online payroll. Fun times!

Then Google killed my search ranking -- I wasn't paying for links or spamming. Beats me why. I got so frustrated with them I gave up.

Still get quite a bit of traffic, though. But now, I'm sure, the traffic pattern is completely different. I wonder if, for static sites with a lot of content, this is something you should repeat every year or so?

Like these guys, I found it a rewarding experience, both for my understanding of the site and for my readers. The reason I'm posting is that many times we view this as a step on the way to creating SaaS, but it can be just a great way to connect with your readers. I bet it's extremely applicable for a lot of blogs.

Wish I could have figured out why those other 90% were there.

Perhaps the 90% were put off by the list of payroll-related things? It likely looked like a slightly more elaborate version of one of those parking sites, with the links to nowhere that are all vaguely related to the domain name (and tons of ads).

Your current site again looks like a spam site. It contains heavily SEOed text that looks like it came from a content farm, some ads, and many of the sort of links that a parking site contains; lots of internal links to more heavily SEOed text.

Basically, you tripped up against heuristics because you look almost exactly like the sort of spam that Google is trying to clear out of its indexes, whether you had good intentions or not.

I don't know, vertex. They were organic traffic, and as I recall they were coming for what seemed like relevant keywords. It's been a while, though.

My current site is a micro-site. I and my wife wrote the material. I hand-designed the layout, hand-coded all the html. As a programmer and a writer, I was pretty excited about the idea of microsites a few years ago. Here was a chance to combine my love of writing and programming to create online magazines around particular topics. I envisioned writing dedicated applications, doing some live updating of relevant information, and so on. It was (and is) a pretty cool idea: a spot between a blog and a dedicated topical site. As far as the guts of how the site works, using internal links, scoring highly on search terms, etc? Read that in an article somewhere. The goal is to create a small spider site around a topic such that people land on one page and see the top 3 or 4 related pages immediately, allowing them to browse tangentially if they're in the wrong spot. There's probably a better way to optimize around that than I did, but I never got around to it. And as far as Adsense, I added on ad unit to pay hosting costs. As I said, once I figured out why folks were visiting the idea was to get rid of it. But Google kept emailing and suggesting I bump it up to three units. Go figure.

And yep, Google killed me because everybody else in the microsite business used content farms, cranking out thousands of pages of crap, loading up with Adsense, flash ads, grabbing emails, and so on.

I still think the microsite idea is a great one, although, you are correct, anything that looks like one is going to get penalized. That's a shame. There's still a lot of potential there. Check out my microsite for books that hackers might like for an idea http://hn-books.com (This is also a good example of a totally-static site that still has a database and lots of interactivity)

In either case, Google's algorithm decided my couple of hundred hours of programming, design, and writing effort wasn't worth it. After horsing around with the idea for a year, losing valuable time, I gave up. As somebody who was not out to game the system, I was collateral damage in the bigger war against crappy content.

Interesting story Daniel -- there should be an "Optimizely for the button to nowhere" product!

Hardest part was coming up with the questions. I still feel like I was missing something. Some important reason they were visiting.

But when you have a site with traffic, you end up with tons of data and very little insight. The button thing moves the needle a little bit, and that's better than nothing.

ADD: One other thing: there's also a minimum amount of traffic you need to make this thing work. 100 visits isn't enough. I'd imagine between 1-5K? Otherwise there's too much noise. Was that your experience as well?

This depends on your goal; in 24 hours, seeing 800 uniques and 100 signups was enough validation for us to take things to the next stage.

Did you consider a search box and button on the site?

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