content - Is a website sidebar a user blind spot?

I've seen studies about how ad blindness can prevent users from even noticing ads exist on a website, but are there any studies that perform the same research for the entire sidebar?

On some sites, like this one, I use the sidebar quite frequently as it has it has useful content relevant to the main content on the page. On other sites, like blogs, I find I very rarely ever use or even look at the sidebar. While these are my own personal browsing habits, I'd love to see some empirical data on what kinds of sidebar content is most engaging and whether there is such a thing as sidebar blindness.

Answer

It can be, if you answer yes to anyone of these questions:

• Has your sidebar remained the exact same for the last 3 months?


• Does your sidebar exhibit signs of “sidebar creep” ?


• Was there a time when people clicked around in your sidebar, but now you’re thinking you might have dreamed it?


• Do you have more than 4 affiliate buttons showing at one time? (not a guarantee of sidebar-blindness, but a possible indicator)


• Do you have 3 or more of your own offers and specials showing at one time?


• Do you have more than 1 social media feed in your sidebar? (ex: latest tweets, latest Flickr photos, latest Facebook statuses)



• Do you have anything in your sidebar that makes you look less cool than you really are? (ex: I have 40 Twitter followers! 12 people subscribe to this blog!)


• Is anything in your sidebar boring, unimaginative, or physically painful to look at?

All from Sarah J. Bray who wrote the post "How to avoid a devastating case of sidebar-blindness (gasp!)"

When I read it I realized I scored 6 of 8 just because I use the sidebar as "the place for everything else, that isn't really valid, but I need to fill the space with something-area". Leading to the fact that no one reads it (me included).

Probably it's better to leave this area empty, if one doesn't have anything valid to put there which could be related links to the content in the middle or great images. I'm going back to the drawing table with mywebsite.com.