I can't comprehend how this article is worthy of Sphinning.  The title implies it's going to help the reader grasp why Conversion Rate Optimization is important.  Yet the only reference in the entire article to what CRO might do, talks about reducing bounce rates.  Which is not at the heart of CRO.

Take the statement "From a statistical standpoint, conversion rate optimisation consultants work to control a website's bounce rate." for example.  Just because you can keep people on your site longer does not mean you're going to get them to buy or fill out those forms.  In fact, keeping them on the site longer could be a result of causing them to become confused and lost as they try to figure out where the things they're looking for can be found.

So reducing bounce rates isn't by itself, much use, and is generally a misleading concept.

CRO is about conversions, not people clicking on more links.

I'm with Alan. I'm not sure what this was about.

Sphinn voting block? Or people just sphinn anything without reading it? SIGH

Jill,

Seriously - all I had to do was read the first paragraph of the article and a red flag went up.  Yet wanting to be fair, I actually read the entire article and thought WTF?

Well you can rest assured that sphinn admins and editors have made note of all who sphunn this and we're looking into the voting history for patterns.

It's fine to promote your Sphinn submissions and ask others to sphinn them if they like them. But people who sphinn without reading what they're sphinning, or who think low quality stuff should be sphunn-- really shouldn't be part of our community here, imo. We understand that they do it so that the others will sphinn up their low quality stuff in return, but is that what everyone wants Sphinn to be?

Jill

Is there any mechanism in place to notify the people who sphunn this 1 to 1 and ask if they actually read it? I mean directly from Sphinn staff?  Just curious. I mean, of those who did Sphinn it that I know, I pretty much respect them across the board.  So now I'm wondering if it's group-hug stuff that people just need to be reminded is dangerous when an article is so meritless...

If an article is HIGH quality I will give it a spin up. However, if it is very high quality I will leave a comment thanking the author for their brilliant prose. Some people spend a lot of time looking for these gems. Wish sphinn did not nofollow links that is bad news.

So @cosmiccarl you believe the article in question is of high quality?  Based on what?

Just wanted to throw into the works here - I don't comment at Sphinn much, but I've been a reader since Sphinn launched. Using the metric of whether people read an article before sphinning it might be very difficult for the following reason:

I often read articles on my favorite blogs that I later notice are on Sphinn. I've already read the post, and if I thought it was really good, I sphinn it, but I don't read it again through sphinn.

Just thought I'd mention this, as a proviso to the idea of using clickthroughs as a metric to determine legitimacy.

That's a valid process Miriam - I've done that myself.  My concern is, and I'm guessing what happened here is that most of the people who gave it a Phinn click didn't even read the article the first time.  Or breezed through it and didn't take a few moments to really grasp what was or wasn't said in the article.