Experiments with MOWG Page Metrics
Over the last few months I’ve been amazed at the ingenuity of some MOWG sites. I’ve seen sites with “hidden verbage” (I have a few myself), I’ve seen sites customized with the MOWG bit at the bottom (below the footer), all in a quest for the perfect MOWG run and improving the MOWG Metrics. And with good reason; your website metrics can make or break your site. (Make sure you watch the video at the bottom of the page, it is straight from Google themselves)
Still, an inherent flaw in MOWG pages is that they tend to lose “stickiness” and indexing over time. The reason for this is simple high bounce rate and low average visitor duration. Both metrics are used extensively by Google when calculating the importance of a webpage.
Bounce Rate
A bounce is defined as a visitor who only looks at 1 single page on a site and then leaves by; closing the browser window, typing in and navigating to a new URL, hitting the “back” button, session timeout or (and this is the most significant for MOWG) clicking on a link to a page on a different web site.
In general a 50% bounce rate is considered average while anything above 60% is considered as cause for concern. If however your bounce rate is over 80% you have a major problem. MOWG (UAP) pages are designed for “The Click”. And it’s that same click that will cause a bounce (if the destination page sits on another domain).
Average Visitor Duration
Average Visitor Duration is simply the total duration of all visits divided by the number of visits. Webpages with low AVD are seen as uninteresting and “not relevant” by Google.
It’s easy to conclude from the above that high BR and low AVD will eventually lead to a particular page getting de-indexed or relegated to the nether pages in Google search results. And that’s why we need to keep pumping pages every so often to keep up our page count and make up for the “lost” ones.
What You Can Do To Improve Your Page Metrics
Don’t: If you have a site that only refers traffic to another site or affiliate links pointing straight out to the offer you will find that your traffic tends to drop off after a while and even while many pages do stay indexed they will start showing up lower in the search results. Google’s reasoning is that if a visitor clicks away from your page as soon as it’s open, it’s not “relevant” enough to deserve a top spot. The only reason for keeping these pages then would be for the link juice. (If you are back-linking something)
Do: The converse of this is equally true. If your MOWG pages are build on the same site as your offer and they direct traffic to a specific page (or range of pages) on the same domain, your site suddenly becomes interesting to Google because people are now visiting more than 1 page on your site AND if the page they land on is interesting enough they may stick around and read it and maybe even take in a few more pages. (Low BR and high AVD)
Adding a video instead of a static image will also increase the visitor interaction with your page which leads to a better ranking for your MOWG pages.
Here’s something to think about. Instead of pointing your affiliate links directly away from your domain to the offer, try building a few “for humans” pages where you give great info about the offer and get your sales from there. Most likely it’ll lead to better conversion too.
Improving your MOWG Page Metrics will help keep your web pages indexed for longer than they would if you just threw up a bunch of pages and left it at that.
What You Can Do To Improve Your Page Metrics cont’d
Conclusion: Of course there are other factors affecting a page’s ranking in the search results (domain age, Home Page PageRank, etc…). But just paying a little at attention to the above will help you construct better strategies for your MOWG runs.
You can find additional information about this topic at Wikipedia. Don’t miss the video.