Yahoo! Buzz Experiment (Part 3 of 3)

This is not about gaming Yahoo! buzz, it’s about giving them what they want. You cannot get a weak new site with a low quality article to do well on Yahoo! Buzz. Yahoo! Buzz is distinctively different from other social voting sites because they use other ranking factors which play a major role in their algorithm.

Getting onto the Top Buzz pages for each category is very easy and only takes a few votes even on a “non major site” like Blogging Fingers with a topic that isn’t especially highly searched for, but those pages send very little traffic (at least the business page does). We are talking less than 100 uniques with 59 votes! (see part 1 for details)

How To Get To The Top Of Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo! tells us what their main ranking factors for Buzz submissions are (see part 2 for a list of them). All you have to do create a post that fits their description.

Look at the top search results for the last few days

You can find the the top 10 search Yahoo! phrases on the Yahoo! Buzz Homepage, which are are updated hourly. When blogging about one of these hot topics remember to use the keywords Yahoo! displays, almost as if you are SEOing the post to rank for them in a normal search engine, but with a catchy news worthy title.

What if my blog doesn’t cover any of the most highly searched for topics?

A very large number of bloggers (including myself) do not own any “mainstream” blogs where the content would naturally fit the categories on Yahoo! Buzz. This presents a solvable problem.

It’s pretty obvious a blog on a mainstream topic helps, but there are ways around this such as the technique Dosh Dosh calls the mullet:

“You can either put the link bait on a page whereby it is displayed to all visitors or place it on a secondary page that is only visible or available to visitors coming directly from social media sites.”

(emphasis is mine)

That way your loyal readers will not be alienated by an off-topic post. Some of the traffic will filter through and click links to your Homepage and other pages. Also getting on Page 1 of any major social voting site results in lots of bloggers blogging about you, which gains you lots of links to your story and more importantly to your Homepage.

Share the story using the Yahoo! email feature… in moderation

This is instead of sharing it completely under the radar. This way Yahoo! can see where at least some of the votes are coming from and so can trust your submission more. This is somewhat theoretical but too much sharing with the Yahoo! Buzz email feature could result in lower ranking for your story because it shows the story wasn’t good enough to make it on its own merit. It’s about getting the balance right!

Extra Yahoo! Buzz Tips

• Make sure your site is clean in terms of SEO, the older and higher ranked the better.
• Share the story quickly in roughly 1-6 hours. 12 hours is the default sorting so for most users stories older than 12 hours will not be visible at all!

Summary

Anyone can make it on Yahoo! Buzz, but that doesn’t mean its worth trying. From this small study is still unknown how much traffic reaching page 1 will send. Writing an off topic post can be very damaging to your readership and techniqes like the mullet are very time consuming. However, it is definitely worth experimenting with the Top Buzz pages for each category, which are easy to reach.

Read part 1 and part 2 or subscribe to the RSS feed.