Search Engine Optimization News Blog

The news about the sudden demise of Michael Jackson came out yesterday. Michael Jackson seems to have suffered a cardiac arrest that resulted in his death or at least that is what we are told by the media. It is also reported that the actual reason for the death of this legend is unclear and the world is waiting for the autopsy reports for the final word on his death. The sudden and unexpected death of this celebrity has thrown the world of music in to grief. It has also elicited a lot of suspicion.

All these have resulted in a heavy surge of traffic in search engines and in other content sites including Wikipedia. People have started searching for available information online frantically hoping to know the mystery behind their favorite pop star’s death. All the search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN experienced a huge volume of traffic.

Other major content sites and social networking sites too faced heavy volume of traffic. No other event in recent history has experienced this high level of traffic including the latest American election.

Around 30% of tweets in Twitter.com yesterday were about Michael Jackson. There are number of reports that the sudden rise of traffic slowed down the search engines and the content sites. The latest Michael Jackson story was the most shared story yesterday in Facebook. The same applies to the other social media sites. Yahoo News recorded 16.4 million unique visitors. For the latest American election yahoo received only 15.1 million unique visitors. This may also be due to the fact that American election was mostly a topic of interest for the Americans whereas Michael Jackson is a global celebrity and his story received greatest global attention. We do not have any numbers from Google. However, Google just reported that its service had a great impact in the past 24 hours because of the traffic that was searching for Michael Jackson story.

The next report comes from Wikipedia. Normally Wikipedia’s page on Michael Jackson gets around 20000 visitors but yesterday Michael Jackson’s pages recorded 1.8 million unique visitors. There were also 650 edits on its pages where the articles were updated with the latest news about Michael Jackson.
We can find the same phenomenon in the other sites such as Digg as well whereby the internet community was sharing and discussing about the latest story on their favorite pop star. Some of them just wanting to know what happened to him while others searching for clues to his sudden suspicious death.
This shows that if we have stories that are powerful enough, we can indeed drive loads of traffic to our sites. However, it is doubtful whether we will be able to create stories that are as powerful as the demise of this legendary pop star.