Sticky Posts and Traffic

  • auxclass · Member ·

    Does having a single sticky Post of a three year old Post have any effect on search engine traffic?

    I brought up a couple of different Posts from the archive and made them sticky (one at a time) – and it seemed like traffic slowed down – that is why I am asking

    Thanks

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • timethief · Member ·

    I don’t know the answer but I’d like to hear it. Many of our themes require us to make our featured posts “sticky” and as there are several sticky featured posts this makes me nervous too.

  • auxclass · Member ·

    I have never seen anything about this talked about at all.

    I was trying to bring attention to two different Posts – so I stuck them one at a time and took a 25% or so hit in traffic – stopped the sticky thing after 5 days and traffic rebounded – but there are a lot of moving parts to traffic and it is difficult to isolate only one factor.

    So this little experience made me curious

    thanks

  • jeremeylduvall · Member ·

    Hi @captnmike,

    Labeling a post as “sticky” has no bearing on how it appears in search engines. A post being sticky only affects where it appears at WordPress.com. I suspect the fluctuations in traffic were due to another factor as you mention.

  • auxclass · Member ·

    However search engines do recognize what is on the home page – I did a Post a few weeks ago and the Post did show as part of the front page but not under it’s own URL for a while – also a sticky when sticking an old Post – search engines do understand the age of information – and search engines do like fresh and new content

    thanks

  • timethief · Member ·

    @auxclass
    Since April I have noticed a significant downturn in my stats . I do not accept the presumption that my blog was affected by the Google algorithms at all because the only duplicate content in my blog is in blockquotes and tends to be my own words in my own posts and in support forum threads. My latest discovery in my Google webmaster’s account is hundreds of posts that are errors – author byline errors with the notation of “edited 4 times”. I have never changed my username. I have not edited my author byline. I’m seriously considering switching to a basic plain Jane theme and eliminating all featured posts just to see what the result may be.

  • auxclass · Member ·

    The link errors suck – I had close to 1,000 when I moved – since we can’t exclude directories I was stuck with the bad matched file structure – also WordPress.COM will not handle converting permalinks from default ugly to what is used here – over a year – and 3 years later still get some broken links for directories that don’t exist

    My traffic is very seasonal – from peak to min. the last two years has been a 60% drop into December – so comparing things is a bit tricky – the first 3 months this year were dead even with last year – then year over year when looking at month vs. month things have been up.

    So the seasonal makes comparing my stats a bit tricky – since Quantcast went away I had to build a special spread sheet for page views so I could see what the trends were during the year

    But the drop I noted above with the sticky was just like going from the 3rd floor down to the 2nd floor – and the day to day was very consistent for the 5 days –

  • timethief · Member ·

    @auxclass
    I just switched themes and got rid of every sticky post.

    @jeremeylduvall
    I forgot to say thanks for your response above.

  • auxclass · Member ·

    @TT – good luck with the change

    This was my only test with Sticky – I did add one of the Posts that I had sticky to the “Useful Articles” section of the Sidebar

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