That's a really nice idea. Immediately I was wondering how you'd deal with refeeral spam, then I noticed your 'from search engine only' bit.
That does make me think there might be a fairly easy way to spam your service though: find a search page where page of spammer ranks high, do lots of visits from botnet to page of target with referring url search engine page.
You'd think that these are 'related' pages whereas in fact no such link exists.
You'll have to guard against that somehow, check back on the search page and see if it is really related or if somebody is spoofing the referrer.
Thanks for the feedback! In its current implementation, the widget actually only displays other articles on the installed site (that way it's more useful to the site owner). And each visitor's arrival only affects the widget as it displays to them -- they don't affect how it appears for other users.
edit: couldn't resist temptation to play around with it :)
I see how it works now, that's nifty. So, basically you're taking the search query, you retrieve the search terms and then you fish up a bunch of urls on the local server to try to capture the user longer.
This should have a measurable effect on time-on-site and bounce-rate stats.
You should do an A/B test for sets of pages with and without the widget to see if those variables change measurably (outside of statistical noise range).
That way you can get yourself a unique selling point.
That does make me think there might be a fairly easy way to spam your service though: find a search page where page of spammer ranks high, do lots of visits from botnet to page of target with referring url search engine page.
You'd think that these are 'related' pages whereas in fact no such link exists.
You'll have to guard against that somehow, check back on the search page and see if it is really related or if somebody is spoofing the referrer.