A lot of forums and blogs have links at the bottom of the article to jump to the Previous Post or the Next Post, by way of various forum and blog system PrevNext plugins. More recently, Q&A platforms have been shifting to show a sidebar listing of other similar questions asked. DaniWeb goes this route.
I was wondering if anyone out there has found either of these methods very helpful? What is the likelihood that, when stumbling across a question or topic as a result of a Google search, that you would have an interest in the question that just so happened to have been asked before or after?
I understand that the goal here is to increase time on site and user retention, but surely there are some better ways of going about achieving that. You know, ways that actually take the user's tastes or interests into consideration. Or, perhaps, I'm just way too much about data mining.
I guess the benefits are not so much for a Q&A site, but more for a discussion forum about a topic where there might be interest in browsing one topic after the next. What about going the route of infinite scrolling if that's the case?
Out of curiosity, what do the interwebs here think about news sites that do infinite scrolling on articles, such that you click on one article, and just keep scrolling infinitely down seeing one article after the next?
A problem that we definitely suffer from here at DaniWeb is people coming into an individual forum thread as a result of a Google search, and then bouncing as soon as they read what they needed to read. It's definitely a symptom of being the type of site where people typically visit only when they are actively trying to solve a problem, and are therefore goal-minded in their visit. They're not in the mindset to be like, "Oh, while I'm here trying to solve a problem, look at this nice purple forum I stumbled across. Let me stop what I'm working on and sign up and customize my profile!"
What could we be doing better, for example, to get this visitor to visit just one more page?