It’s Friday and I thought we’d start a new tradition here at the Active Internet Marketing blog – the Friday Digital Marketing Roundup!

This is a fast moving industry, and there’s a ton of content produced every week. We’re going to share some of our favorite stories of the week and some of our opinions with you.

We’ll do all the hard work of shifting through the hundreds of posts every week and give you the very best, so you can sound like an expert in your Friday afternoon chats.

New Click-Through-Rate Study Released

If you’ve ever had to sit down and do traffic projections for an SEO project, you know that figuring out the click-through-rate for one of the spots in the organic search results can be tricky. I know that I’ve seen the 1st spot listed anywhere from 13% to 60%. This new study puts the figure at 33%, which comes close to splitting those two figures in half.

33%, instinctively, sounds about right to me. But it’s not in my nature to trust any outside sources without comparing my own data. Off to the Analytics lab I’ll go after we’re done here…

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Other Click-Through-Rate Studies

Here are some other interesting studies on click-through-rate:

Geoff Kenyon

Internet Marketing Ninjas

Sliders are Bad

Over at Search Engine Land, we have a post that seems to confirm a gut feeling I’ve had for a while now – homepage sliders are on the way out.

Sliders were the rage for what seems like a decade now, but lately I think many of us have questioned how well they work. First, they look like ads, and that’s not really what you want the homepage to look like. Second, they are a bit distracting, and the most successful sites out there have very simple homepages that put the focus on the major offering of the business.

This study confirms that sliders tend to confuse users and take the focus off the content. Thank you, author, for taking the time to put some real numbers to this gut feeling.

301 Redirect Usage

At Moz.com, there’s a fantastic report on how to destroy your site with bad 301 redirects.

Not found errors are a personal pet peeve, so I spend a lot of time chasing that elusive “0 Not Found” mark in Webmaster Tools for our clients.

No matter how hard you try, there’s always a new broken link to your site popping up somewhere, and the tendency can be to get a bit frustrated and just send those to the homepage.

This post confirms that redirecting to the homepage, universally, isn’t a great idea.

The challenge of implementing good redirects is taking the time to find the best page for a broken link and match them all up – which can be tedious, especially with a new site that you haven’t managed that has hundreds of these errors.

Numbers don’t lie though, and these numbers show that taking that time to do it right will pay off for you in the long run.

Additionally, I found it interesting that 302s are more likely to be treated as a type of “soft” 301 now – it just goes to show that the engines are getting better every day at figuring out what we were trying to do with your sites, even when mistakes are made.

Generating Content Ideas

When you open up that editorial calendar and see a blank sheet running infinitely into the future, it can be a bit intimidating.

This awesome post helps you take one idea and turn it into a bunch of great ideas. Add in some content repurposing and you have the makings of a full year of content in just a few hours. That’ll take your blood pressure down a bit, eh?

Final Thoughts

How do you feel about 301 redirects? Do you spend the time to do 1-1 redirects to appropriate pages, and see the results? How about homepage sliders? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

And since it’s Friday, enjoy this fun site if you are a bit stressed from the week.