'Netting Visitors

In addition to a general redesign of its Web site in 2004, SSI added movies of its shredding equipment in action. For the first few months that the new site was up, site visitation nearly quadrupled as people began to forward the link to friends and colleagues, according to an SSI press release.

But then something unexpected happened. The shredding movies attracted the attention of bloggers and now defunct TechTV show called “The ScreenSavers,” which featured visit to the SSI site March 8^th and showed some of the movies of couches, washing machines and computers being chewed to pieces.

In the days following the airing of the show, which was only available to DirecTV subscribers, SSI says it began to get hundreds of thousands of hits to its site, culminating in a half-a-million visits by the end of March. While “The ScreenSavers” and TechTV have been yanked from the airwaves since the show, SSI’s Web site continues to benefit from increased traffic as bloggers add the link to their own sites, exponentially increasing its visibility to search engines across the Web.

While most of the hits are likely teenage boys who think it’s cool to watch things being destroyed, SSI says one benefit to having a half-a-million freeloaders drop in for the show is that all the attention makes its Web site more interesting to search engines. According to SSI, before the new site was launched, a Google search for “industrial shredders” wouldn’t bring up SSI before page eight or nine of the search results. “Now,” the SSI release says, “the same generic search query brings up SSI first, to both teenaged boys and recycling tycoons.”