Yahoo! Buzz Experiment (Part 2 of 3)

In Part 1 I told the story of how a Blogging Fingers post never reached page one of Yahoo! Buzz, despite having a higher number of votes compared to many of the page 1 stories (it reached 59 within 10 hours). In this post I will attempt to explain why it didn’t make it, by looking at how Yahoo! Buzz works.

Yahoo! Buzz Ranking Factors

These are the known factors that influence how much Buzz a story can have.

• Number votes it receives on Yahoo! Buzz
• The popularity of related search terms on Yahoo! Search
• The number of times that content is shared with friends over email using the “Send” email feature that is available fore each story. It’s possible that this could be a “negative” ranking factor, where if you have to email it to lots of people for it to get the votes it may not be as a very good story, but then it could be better than having lots of votes appear out of the blue? (just a thought!)
• Moderators select content from the top of Yahoo! Buzz to appear on the Yahoo! homepage. This experiment is just about getting to page 1 of Yahoo! Buzz, not the main Yahoo Homepage as there is no control over that.

Yahoo! lets you submit content you find on Yahoo! Buzz directly to other social voting sites. This shows Yahoo! are trying to remain the “Internet’s leading starting point” by attracting users of other social voting sites to start at Yahoo! Buzz to find stories, many of which will be Yahoo! news stories anyway, which results in their promotion. Clever Yahoo!.

Explaining The Blogging Fingers Submission To Yahoo! Buzz

• The post isn’t quite mainstream enough (despite being one of the most mainstream and popular post on Blogging Fingers)
• Yahoo! Buzz uses their search ranking of a site as a factor, I suspect the Websites submitted will need higher rankings than Blogging Fingers to reach page 1, especially since Blogging Fingers is still suffering Google penalizations some of which Yahoo! may be enforcing too. In Yahoo!’s own words, “A great story on a major news site, (or) an extraordinary bit from an obscure site” can make it hot. So if your site is “major”, you can get away with your news being only great rather than extraordinary (excuse my cynicism!).
• Almost all the page 1 stories have a thumbnail image, the Blogging Fingers submission did not which could have hindered its progress. You have to have had previous success with Yahoo! buzz to be invited to have the thumbnail option.
• The votes definitely did help keep the position on the page, somewhat counteracting the “not a major site” factor. It was hot for upwards of 10 hours , the rest on page 8 where only hot for 1-7 hours.

There is lots more testing too be done with Yahoo! Buzz in different categories and also investigating the timing of the votes and whether there is such a thing as “power profiles”, where a vote from a highly used account is algorithmically worth more than a normal vote (like on digg). The Yahoo Buzz links contain the rel=”nofollow” tag so there is little reward for spammers flooding the site with lots of submissions for SEO purposes, although the submissions do rank very highly in the Google search results, often higher than the original story.

Timing Of Votes

The submission “went hot” with just 4 votes. That sent it to the page 1 of its category but not the main page. There is no way of knowing from this single test if having the 50 votes immediately after going hot would help increase the likelihood of the story reaching page 1 or if having them spread out through the day is better. Most of the 50+ votes came in “clusters” across roughly a 10 hour period.

Summary

Looking at the other Top Top Buzz stories there is so much variation in timing and votes it makes me increasingly sure that the Yahoo! search ranking/trust of a site is too big a factor for it to be worth it for the average blogger, but well worth it for Yahoo!.

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