Recently, when the Twitter world was buzzing a bit about @markdavidson's Twitter joke about being abused by his supposed ghostwriters, I started a small joke about how Mark may or may not be a real person. When discussing the events with my coworker Karen, I noticed that some details of Mark's background didn't check out properly. For example, we tried to call a couple of phone numbers associated with Mark's websites and personality, the numbers ran through to a generic voicemail without details. It seemed very strange for someone who worked at a marketing agency to not have their voicemail set up properly, and we grew suspicious.

Karen asked me the question, "Is this guy even real?" and I knew we had an idea for a great site at that point. Nine dollars later, I owned "IsMarkDavidsonReal.com", and then spent 20 minutes throwing together a fast one-page site, detailing the weird things we'd found and a form asking people to send us more leads. I tweeted a link to the site once, and had a couple of retweets to help spread the word. I was caught by surprise by how well it caught on right afterwards though - In the first hour after I launched the site, I received over 1000 hits, and the rate continued. A number of news/gossip blogs linked to the site as part of the ongoing discussion, and I got a call from a reporter from The Atlantic for an interview. The site wound up attracting a significant amount of attention in a very short time.

This is really interesting, because we can create a play-by-play of when the site was tweeted, when it was first linked to from another site, and when it started to record organic search traffic to the website. I hope this is helpful to people looking at getting new sites indexed and ranking - As the timeline shows, I went from my first visit, to my first inbound link, to my first organic search visit from Yahoo in just over an hour.

The Timeline of IsMarkDavidsonReal.com

This timeline was pulled from the logs of HubSpot's analytics engine.

September 22nd: Around 11:30 PM EDT, I register the domain "IsMarkDavidsonReal.com". I don't do anything with it right away. (All other times are in EDT as well)

September 23rd: The next morning around 7:30 AM I update the DNS to point to an actual page, which became the site's homepage. I haven't told anyone about this site yet, and hold talking about it until I've created the homepage so I don't spoil it for my coworkers.

2:00 PM: Now that the DNS is resolving worldwide, I create the site's homepage, put a form on it, and leave it for an hour.

3:23 PM: I tweet a link to the site, and it is retweeted almost right away by @karenrubin and @markdavidson. Mark also posts the link to his Facebook profile. (Not a fan page, his personal profile. Mark's privacy settings are such that his wall and profile are not visible without being Friends with him.)

3:23 PM: The site gets its first visits, from Twitter and then from the Facebook post.

3:42 PM: A link to the website is published in a Metafilter post, and gets a visit from the post within a few seconds of being published. This is the website's first inbound link and first visit that isn't from Twitter, a Twitter client (like Hootsuite) or Facebook. Also worth noting, the link from Metafilter is a dofollow link.

Over the next hour, the website continues to get a significant amount of traffic, almost entirely from Twitter but occasionally from Metafilter or Google Reader. By looking at the specific Google Reader referring URLs, it appears that they are people who read Metafilter via RSS and are subscribed in Reader. (All of the referring URLs reference metafilter after the google.com/reader section). At this point, the website is getting approximately 60-70 hits a minute, and I am only getting about one visit every 5-10 minutes from Facebook. It appears the Facebook post hit its half-life very quickly and did not spread like it did on Twitter.

4:40 PM: The website gets its first visit from Organic Search, from a Bing-powered Yahoo search at 4:40 PM for the query, "Is Mark Davidson Real?"

5:11 PM: The website gets its first visit from a share on Google+.

6:02 PM: The website gets its first visit from Google's search engine, from a search on google.nl for "ismarkdavidsonreal". This clearly looks like someone who was already familiar with the domain because they typed it with no spaces. However, their browser had not been seen before - There was no tracking cookie set from previous visits from that browser.

Very shortly afterwards, over the next ten minutes, a number of blogs pick up the URL and start sending traffic through, as well as a lot more search traffic - After those first visits, several more visits come through for different search terms around "mark davidson twitter" and "is mark davidson real" and similar phrases. The website is still getting very significant traffic at this point, and ends up getting almost 2500 visits before midnight.

I later received more inbound links, including the link from The Atlantic's coverage. Other websites that run their content contributed links to, but not all of them are dofollow links. For example, Yahoo News runs the URL through their redirection service and attached a nofollow onto it.

Here is a chart of overall traffic over the weekend for the domain, for anyone who is curious how it trailed off:

It isn't clear exactly when Google indexed the site, but it clearly took less than three hours for a brand-new domain with absolutely no history to be indexed and appear in search results for very closely related keywords, even with one or two inbound links initially. Bing was clearly much faster at indexing my new site - I started receiving traffic much earlier from Bing-powered search, and this was a topic that was receiving a decent amount of search volume in that brief window. I was very pleasantly surprised that Bing managed to index and start sending me traffic barely an hour after the site appeared on the web, and apparently solely based on Twitter and Facebook activity.

Without access to the Twitter stream anymore, Google had to wait a relatively long time to find out about my website, index it, and move on - Google took over two hours from the Metafilter post to start sending me search traffic. If they were tracking more social media activity, they would have picked up on it much more quickly. Bing's jumped right on it. Still, anyone being able to find my website via search in that short a time period is pretty remarkable - Search is a fast and powerful medium to draw in traffic, and modern search engines are able to handle and add new sites very quickly.

While it's possible that the pages were indexed much earlier on and I just didn't get traffic until then, I think that is fairly unlikely - The topic was popular, and once I started getting search traffic at all from a source it started coming through in a pretty strong fashion. I have no evidence to back it up but it's the most likely explanation given that I started to receive continued volume after the first search - people were just waiting to have a good search result to click, and Google and Bing were waiting to finish adding my site.

Breaking this down after the event, I now have sixteen do-follow links pointing to the domain and a large number of nofollow from other websites. I'm exploring what exactly I can do with them to maximize the value out of them, but in terms of harnessing current events and turning them into SEO value, the website did a great job - For 20 minutes of work and $9 for a domain registration, I was able to harness a lot of traffic and buzz momentarily. It absolutely pays off to stay on top of what's going on across the web, because you never know when opportunity will strike and offer you a chance to do something fun and build SEO value out of it. I hope this provides you with some inspiration to the value of these small sites and how you can do interesting things with fast moving topics or hot issues.