Affiliate Classroom was one of the first companies to introduce readers to the “scent” of a web page. (See “What Odor is your SEO?”) And now here’s a new term you may run across. It’s called Pogo-Sticking! I always wanted a pogo stick when I was a kid, so this one had me curious.

How many times have you performed a search and didn’t find what you were looking for? Or visited the same page of a web-site several times to get back to the main page, or search results page? Well, when you do this you are pogo-sticking!

Anytime there is back and forth activity it’s called pogo-sticking. This can happen within a web page, when a person goes back and forth between individual product pages and/or home pages looking for their desired information, or between SERP results pages.

Basically, pogo-sticking occurs when a person jumps back and forth between different pages. This usually occurs when something is searched for and the search engine results page (SERP) displays. The searcher then selects the result that looks like it will give the best answer and solve the problem. If the answer isn’t on that page the person hits the “back” button, goes back to the SERP and trys again.

So, why is it important to recognize this new word?

Because it could skew your back-end statistics!

You see, each time the visitor goes back and forth to pages within a web site, the statistical software on your server counts it as a page view. Sometimes it’s good to get a lot of page views, and then again, sometimes it means that the visitor is not finding what they are looking for.

So, the next time you jump for joy when you view your statistics and see that your page is sticky, do a double check. If you have a lot of pages views from a small amount of visitors, you might want to take a look at your site’s design and see if it is as user-friendly as it should be.

When visitors don’t find what they’re looking for in a reasonable time, they just pogo-stick back to the SERP and go elsewhere. Unfortunately, you get the page views, but someone else gets the sale!