Hundred Dollar SEO

April Fools day is an interesting day for observation on the Internet. Many Internet companies are run by people with good senses of humor. So there are a wide variety of jokes that propagate every year. Some people just “get it” in terms of what the the Internet is, and some don’t.

Digg made a damaging error that many people make in addressing the Internet. The Internet is a carrier of information, it is not a channel for entertainment. While Digg’s attempt was funny, and well intentioned, it relied on making a technological change rather than an informational change. Pigeon Rank was effective because it spread amongst a certain group without disrupting the function of the site. As opposed to sites that pretend they have been hacked.

When sites interrupt the ability for people to actually use the site they end up with more angry/concerned e-mails than they do awareness of their pranks. Being fun is not as important as being functional. Last week Dreamhost crashed the Spunky cluster and many people became angry, because being down for several hours means more than just lost of instantaneous revenue.

Beyond the value that is lost in the moment, there is also value that is lost from customers that turn away and search spiders that do not see intended content. For most sites downtime is like roulette, a 1 in 16 chance that you spend the rest of the month with a major decrease in traffic. It is not the most likely occurrence, but you will be very unhappy if it happens on the wrong day.

A simple piece of advice for all changes on your site: If it can break your user experience test it before going live.

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