A few weeks ago I was talking with some fellow SEOs about websites (shocker, right?). Somehow we got onto the topic of the flyout plugins that you see on a lot of news websites such as the New York Times and tech websites like Mashable.
During the course of the conversation, a couple of them remarked that they “always click that thing, man”. I noted that I always see it, but that those flyouts tend to annoy me. This conversation got the wheels turning in my brain, though, so I decided to run a little test on you guys.
I apologize. Not really, but I thought I’d try to make you feel better for being my unknown guinea pigs. So I thank you for your participation.
I installed a Flyout Plugin
This site is built on WordPress, so I decided to see what would happen if I found a flyout plugin and installed it on the site. I decided to use the nRelate Flyout Plugin since it does not hide the links behind Javascript (I also use the nRelate Related Posts plugin on this site, which recently released a non-JS version as well. Update granted).
The metrics I was watching were:
- Time on site
- Pageviews per visit
- Bounce Rate
Shizam!
If you operate a blog and it makes sense to do so, install a flyout plugin. Your metrics will thank you.
.png)
Hi John, awesome post, just commented on SEOmoz post on similar type of practice followed what you mentioned above i.e. increased time on site, bounce rate and page views.. I have just added the comment on to the post with your site reference
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-we-managed-to-benefit-from-the-panda-updates#jtc178151
Awesome, thanks Sandeep!