A friend told me that within the next 6 weeks, she was going to be able to do 100 pushups, and sent me a link about it. She’s following a program she found on a simple website that helps you gradually build up to 100 pushups, no matter what your fitness level is. Apparently it’s a “thing” going around. As in, viral. I’ve been keeping up with it for a few weeks, and while it’s nothing revolutionary, perhaps it being part of a trend is just that right extra push to get people (or me) over the hump when it comes to exercising.
Since I started working in SEO, I approach anything “viral” or even popular page with some skepticism. Is this page designed for humans or search engines? Google, of course, would assert that the best pages are designed for both.
To truly answer the above question, I would have to converse with the page’s designer. I’m sure it would be a straightforward thing. No matter what the originial intentions were, I would like to analyze facets of the page from an SEO analyst’s perspective, and see what we can find.
This week we’re going to take a basic look at two questions.
Question #1: When Did This Site Go Viral?
Google trends gives us the timeline we are looking for. Firstly, there are some interesting observations to be made. There are no news events, which leads me to believe that this page spread amazingly by true word of mouth. Secondly, the page has been popular in Scandanavia. The page went big in the summer of 2008 and after its initial adjustment, has maintained consistent or better search volume.
Google Insights for Search gives us an even more detailed graph. The site seems to have started in 2006, and something happened in 2008 that truly launched it to fame.
A last piece of info tells us when the domain was registered, thanks to whois.com. So it looks like the 2006 searches had to do with something else. What, I’m not sure.
Question #2: How Much Interest is There?
The Adwords tool can show us who is searching for the 100 pushups keyword family. In the excercise world, 100 pushups is an arbitrary number- so most people who enter this search would be following the trend. Here’s today’s adwords data, filtered for relevant terms.
Most companies would be drooling over that kind of public interest!
We’ve only taken a look at “when” and “how much.” We really only just scratched the surface. Stay tuned for Part 2 next week, where we go much deeper and take a further look into this website as approached from an SEO brain, using some more advanced tools.