I recently joined one of my blogs to EntreCard and sure enough have seen much more traffic. The problem, of course, is that most of them don't stay long or even click links. I can tell this is putting a drag on my traffic stat averages. My stats used to show that on average people were staying about 2 and half minutes reading my blog. Now, thanks to the drive-by EntreCard crowd, it's down to one and a half minutes for an average visit. Is Google likely penalizing me and others for this? Am I jeopardizing my PR4 with so much fleeting traffic now? Or will Google stop indexing my new pages? What's the penalty for a high bounce rate?
Yeah, Alina. I'm considering removing EntreCard. I'm just not sure if I'm worried about this low-quality traffic for nothing. Maybe Google won't penalize me...?
Basically, the Entrecard's traffic is bounced and people really don't spend more than 10 sec on your blog. But! If you are active as a blogger yourself, leave comments and read other blogs, then you will definitely get loyal readers. Do you join the Entrecards forums? This is where you get closer to bloggers and bloggers are the ones who read blogs! If you can read between lines, then you got the idea.
That's good insight, Koz. I hear exactly what you're saying. Yes, I have spent some time in the EC forum when I first joined, but haven't been there much at all after I had that first look around to learn the ropes. I'll have to weigh out how realistic it is for me to spend time in EC forum. I have a tough enough time making sure I pop into this one, commenting on Flickr, BC, MBL, and 2 Nings!
Guys, the EC is only 8 months old!!! I have to be honest: I do not spend my time with dropping, and you shouldn't concentrate on EC only. I am gonna tell you something that is very obvious but you probably couldn't figure out yourself: be nice with bloggers and they will blog about you:) If you ever heard about linkbait - this is the easiest way to get it - my IMHO
I use entrecard not for the drops... but for the advertising. I drop my 300 cards to get ec points so I can put my ec banner on related sites to generate related traffic. So far it has been beneficial and have made some earnings via adsense.
I agree with desilator, Entrecard is great for advertising, but you're not likely to receive quality visitors from anything else they offer.
I personally tried EntreCard and it was terrible... Users were spending less than a minute on my website and worse still - I was getting a lot of SPAM through my "Contact Us" form... Would NOT recommend this..