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But where did they get more traffic from to begin with? You're implying they got traffic from "fill-all-the-keywords strategies", which is more-or-less what the

But where did they get more traffic from to begin with? You're implying they got traffic from "fill-all-the-keywords strategies", which is more-or-less what the analysis is advocating. That may not be true, but your alternative hypothesis isn't actually an alternative. At least not as I understand it. That said, I do think controlling for follower counts would be informative. It would help tell you if there's actually something else at play (e.g. once you control for follower count, there's no more correlation). I suspect it could also tell you the # of hashtags is even more important than currently shown because it also helps build your base of followers, by reaching more new visitors. E.g. If increased hashtags increase my number of favorites, they also increase my number of followers by some percentage. Then each successive post has a larger direct reach of followers, in addition to the new visitor reach from hashtag discovery. A single hashtag could actually have a compounding value.

NoPiece 13y ago
My alternative theory might explain it: Bad actors who stuff their photos with 30 keywords also use shill accounts to like them.
gus_massa 13y ago
My comment was not very clear. I’ll try again. For simplicity let’s suppose that there are only two types of users: * Some users have an account in every social network, have a very popular blog, perhaps pay for some advertisement, fill in all the keywords / tags fields, and use all the SEO they can. * Some users take the photo, and just copy the nouns of the title to the tags field. If this model is correct, most of the photos with lots of tags are from users with lots of followers and that is the cause of the additional likes. The original (implicit) idea of the article is that the photos with more tags appear in more search results, and this is the cause of the additional likes. [I hope this simplified version is an accurate enough.] Real life is usually more complicated, there are more than two types of users, and perhaps both effects are present. I like the analysis of the data, but I’m not sure if this can be transformed directly in a strategy to gain followers. Perhaps this is a consequence of cargo cult SEO. How can we setup an experiment to distinguish between the two effects?

NoPiece 13y ago

My alternative theory might explain it: Bad actors who stuff their photos with 30 keywords also use shill accounts to like them.

gus_massa 13y ago

My comment was not very clear. I’ll try again. For simplicity let’s suppose that there are only two types of users: * Some users have an account in every social network, have a very popular blog, perhaps pay for some advertisement, fill in all the keywords / tags fields, and use all the SEO they can. * Some users take the photo, and just copy the nouns of the title to the tags field. If this model is correct, most of the photos with lots of tags are from users with lots of followers and that is the cause of the additional likes. The original (implicit) idea of the article is that the photos with more tags appear in more search results, and this is the cause of the additional likes. [I hope this simplified version is an accurate enough.] Real life is usually more complicated, there are more than two types of users, and perhaps both effects are present. I like the analysis of the data, but I’m not sure if this can be transformed directly in a strategy to gain followers. Perhaps this is a consequence of cargo cult SEO. How can we setup an experiment to distinguish between the two effects?