If you’ve been doing SEO for any length of time, chances are you have stories to tell about a nightmare situation or client. And if you’re on Twitter, chances are you were sharing some of those stories over the past few days using the #SEOHorrorStories hashtag — a hashtag that became so popular it actually reached Twitter’s trends on Friday evening.
How #SEOHorrorStories Began
Credit for the hashtag goes to Aleyda Solis, one of our SEO columnists on Search Engine Land, who posted the first tweet Friday morning and then invited other SEOs to do the same.
And the SEO industry jumped right in, with people all over the world hopping on the #SEOHorrorStories bandwagon.
Even Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s webspam team, got involved. And the official Google Analytics Twitter account sent out several SEO horror story tweets (three are included here).
With a total of 1.3 million followers between the two accounts (including those who follow both), that’s huge exposure for the hashtag.
Over the weekend, Olivier Duffez started the French version of the hashtag: #horreursduseo.
SEO On Twitter Trends
The hashtag was so popular by Friday evening that it hit Twitter trends, as Martin Macdonald captured in this tweet:
I’m thinking that’s probably the first time an SEO-related hashtag has ever reached Twitter trends. (If anyone knows for sure, one way or another, please let me know via a tweet to @mattmcgee.)
How Far Did #SEOHorrorStories Travel?
In short, pretty far — especially for an SEO-related hashtag. There are a number of different hashtag analysis tools you can use for data. None of them are showing the same exact numbers, but they’re pretty close.
Number Of Tweets
According to FollowTheHashtag, there were 1,668 tweets with #SEOHorrorStories as of late Monday. Topsy says the number is more in the 1,300-1,400 range. HashTracking.com‘s count is also in that same lower range.
Topsy shows how quickly the hashtag took off:
Impressions
FollowTheHashtag also has the highest count here — 10.9 million as of late Monday. Hashtracking.com says there was about 8.5 million “timeline deliveries.”
But numbers aside, as several SEOs pointed out — perhaps none better than Greg Gifford — #SEOHorrorStories is great reading for job-related comedy and proof that misery loves company.
One last note: Aleyda Solis has written her own recap of how the #SEOHorrorStories hashtag spread, and she also created a Twitter account — @SEOHorrorStory — for SEOs to keep the stories alive.
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