Working the Aggregators

As a relatively new blogger, I found it odd when I started having articles showing up into news aggregators, sites that automatically pull in blogs related to a certain subject based on keywords they look for. The odd thing is that I’m showing up aggregators that have absolutely nothing to with I’m writing about. It’s a flaw in the system, I guess. The first time it happened to me, I wrote about the day my car broke down on Pottery Road in Toronto. Picking up on the word “pottery,” the article got listed into an aggregator that seemed to grab articles related to pottery and gardening.

Even though the site had nothing to do with my article, I was on there, and according to my Google Analytics tool I got almost 25% of my traffic referrals from there. I’d show you the link, but I just tested it and it appears to be offline, which is a bit of a drag because the people who clicked through from that site visited an average of 9.22 pages per visit and spent an average of 17 minutes and 4 seconds on the site, which is pretty darn good all things considered.

Today, it happened again when I mentioned TED MOSBY, SEX ARCHITECT from a recent episode of How I Met Your Mother. I got picked up by ArchitectFad, an aggregator that populates itself by looking for articles containing the word “architect.” I’m assuming related terms like “architecture” would also warrant an add.

I’d like to figure out just how many aggregator sites there are out there and what words each of them looks for. I’m going to keep a list of which words get hits, and maybe, from time to time, I’ll whip out articles with seeming disconnected words like artichoke, rambler, furlong, and wasabi just to see how many ping-backs I can get. Should be an interesting way to generate traffic, as well as one whale of a funky good time (he added desperately hoping to get picked up by aggregators dedicated to marine biology and funk music).