We’ve yet to see this phenomenon analyzed anywhere in the media, so let’s give this a signal boost: The secret to becoming popular on YouTube is to build heat. Sometimes you create something so great it goes viral on its own. Sometimes you know the right people and the right places. Sometimes, though, you’re good with the timing and keywords. That is actually an effective way to get popular on YouTube — this Pomplamoose clip, for example, was a very well-timed attempt to bank its success on a popular song at the height of its notoriety. But what if you take that philosophy to the extreme? The answer is that you end up with TheReplyGirl. Let’s explain how this works:
Edit: Reworded part of this for clarification.
A suggestion for Tumblr: Try to figure out a way so spammers can’t use this black-hat SEO (search engine optimization) technique. It’s dead simple to take advantage of, and as a result, some sites (such as our own) often drown in it. Today, for example, we got a ton of fake traffic from bots doing an obscure search on Google (see screenshots). Here’s a quick explanation as to what’s happening, as far as we can see:
» But we have a temporary solution: Are you, like us, getting a lot of spam on your Tumblr? This is a likely reason. We’d like to offer a suggestion to solve the problem. If you know how to edit your theme in HTML, do a search for the phrase “{PostNotes}” and replace it with this: ”<!—googleoff: all—>{PostNotes}<!—googleon: all—>”. This prevents the notes from getting crawled by Google, which is good because it focuses your content, but bad, because any relevant content in reblogs won’t account for what shows up in search engines. This is really a problem Tumblr needs to look at — if they take out common phrases or make them invisible to search engines, everyone wins. But we hope this at least helps your sanity. It’ll help ours.
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