10 Min Email

What is it … and why am I getting their search engine traffic?

First thing is first, if you’re looking for the website 10minutemail.com, this obviously isn’t it.  I won’t be offended if you leave now, but I hope I’ve been able to direct you to your destination.

What is 10 Minute Mail?

And for my fellow website builders and promoters:  In case you don’t know, 10MinuteMail is a great way to deal with the massive amount of registrations you’re almost certainly forced to complete every week.  What they do is give you a temporary, 10 minute email account.  When 10 min. is up, you can either renew the account or toss it aside.

You can see any emails that arrive in the web interface, and you don’t have to sign up with them to get the emails (That would kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?)

As I find new blogs, social media networks, and bookmarking sites that require email validation in their account registrations, I’ll collect them in a browser.  When there’s a few to sign up for, I’ll pop open another browser with 10MinuteMail and direct all the emails into that temporary address.  I wish I had started a while ago, because it drastically cuts down on the amount of noise in my “real” email accounts (the ones attached to my websites).

Ok, sounds great.  What is this post about?

For the last few months, I’ve been getting traffic for people who are looking for this email service.  Normally, traffic wouldn’t be a problem – but in this case I didn’t even know about 10 min mail until their traffic started coming in.

I had a completely irrelevant web page ranking for their brand keywords – and I didn’t even have a post to redirect surfers to where they really wanted to go.

This seems wrong to me on a lot of levels!

My goal, and Google’s as well, is to promote relevancy – and this situation currently has zero.  In my mind, this leaves me with an SEO job to do:  If I want to call myself an SEO, I need to be working to improve the search engine results and improve the experience of surfers online.

So here is my plan to fix the search results.  No, this post is it.  You’re literally looking at it.

I’m hoping this page is more optimized for the keywords that have been driving traffic to my site, and in the future, surfers who arrive will have a link right at the top of the page that can take them to their intended destination.  Maybe they’ll stick around a little longer into the content to hear about the service and some ideas on how to make use of it.

The Offending Post – and the Fix

The original post that had been ranking for 10 minute email was actually a guide I had posted about how to install wordpress on Bluehost.  I guess it got the rank because I brag in the title how easy it is to install and how it can be done in ten minutes without prior technical experience.

So I’m linking to it here with a “nofollow” relation attached.  This will also cause WordPress to generate a trackback link on the original post, but that one will follow:  in effect, this creates a one-way link from the page getting the traffic to the page that should be getting the traffic.  And ideally, the page that should be getting the traffic is the actual email service – and there’s a link provided right at the start for that.

If it works, everyone wins.  Will it work?  Here’s to hoping!