pagespank.com

Effects of being flagged as badware in Google

Just a quick note further to my post on wordpress and badware risks; the blog that this happened on had all of its PageRank withdrawn, which has just been reinstated.

This indicates to me that there is a likely PageRank penalty of 6 months from the date that a site is flagged as badware. Of course presumably sites must rectify the badware problem in order to get their PageRank reinstated.

When linkbait becomes dull

All due respect to ShoeMoney but is this really the most interesting thing he can come up with these days? Surely even Calacanis is bored of saying SEO sucks by now?

I am… retarded?

A month on from its launch, I’m still consistently amazed by the poor execution of Orange’s recent advertising campaign. There are a number of these adverts to be seen on billboards everywhere, which generally consist of cod philosophy statements such as:

People are just better together. I am who I am because of everyone.

Bleugh. It’s just a mobile phone network.

Anyway, beyond the sheer gut-wrenching self-satisfied, clever-cleverness of these adverts, the thing that has got a few people’s attention is the addition of a subtle little “search online for ‘i am’” in the bottom left.

What? No URL? But how will we remember to Google it when we get to the office? Well besides the fact that the advertising campaign is instantly forgettable for all but this niggling little thing, I thought “fair enough, they’re trying something new, and it’s to do with search so that must be good”.

So I did remember it and Googled ‘i am’. So apart from the sponsored link at the top, where’s their website? Surely months of planning and meticulous execution have gone into the organic SEO for this campaign? Apparently not. The first time I searched online for ‘i am’, their website was hovering at #70 in Google, just below a site called ‘arseiam.com’ - how ironic

Even now, this site sits at #6 in Google, below the #1 result i-am-bored.com, and is nowhere to be seen on Yahoo or Live search. Astoundingly, Orange did not see fit to do home page takeovers on any of these other sites. Surely if you can’t dominate the natural listings you can buy your way onto the destination pages of other sites that rank better than you?

So here’s a couple of pointers for future offline ’search online for…’ billboard campaigns:

1. Make the advert interesting - make people want to search for something to find out more.
2. Create some kind of mystique around the campaign. Take some pointers from Nine Inch Nails, who did a great online treasure-hunt style campaign last year.
3. Give something away for FREE!! Provide an incentive for people to look for your site.
4. If you’re lucky, people will search for your term on their iPhone or smart phone - help them want to by giving them entertainment (see point 1), a reward (see point 3), or instant gratification (make of that what you will).
5. Choose your key phrase wisely. Don’t allow it to be pushed down from the top. Have meetings about it. Look at the competition for that phrase, and ask yourselves “are we good enough to rank #1 for that in every major search engine?” Don’t let the answer be “no” or “maybe”.
6. Plan and execute a great SEO campaign before you spend any money on offline advertising. Look at dominating the SERPs for your chosen term.
7. See point 1.

According to mad.co.uk, £30 million is going into this campaign. Come on Orange, you can work miracles with that kind of cash can’t you (and your PR7 main site)?

Note: Of course I’m not going to link to this abysmal site, but it’s

• i [dash] am [dash] everywhere [dot] co [dot] uk

Domain Predators

This seems like quite a new but seemingly pervasive spam problem I’ve been getting recently as a result of having my details on several whois databases. I receive random emails from several different companies quite a lot now, which is definitely happening more than it did last year. Here’s just one example from ‘dcinchq’:

We recently acquired xyz.com with the intention of making it available to you. Since you already own xyz.net we thought you might also want the more desirable .com version.

You may have received a note from someone else recently offering the same domain for several hundred dollars. Our price is a one time acquisition cost of just $49.95.

This includes a year of domain name registration, full transfer of ownership to you, and we will even point your new domain to your current website at no extra cost (optional).

For full details please go to:

http://www.dcinchq.com/index.php?domain=xyz.com

If you are not interested in this offer simply hit delete and we will not contact you again. However, keep in mind if you pass on this opportunity someone else could purchase this domain and it may not be available again.

All the best,

Warren Davis
Digital Caucus, Inc.

Now I’m all for discovering new revenue streams but beyond the fact that this is unsolicited email and qualifies directly as spam, this is basically an extreme form of domain squatting. Identify people who own .net or .co.uk TLDs, then wait for the .com domain to expire or just snap it up if it’s available, and extort the money from the original domain owners.

I’ve also received emails from when I already have the .com, .net & .co.uk or whatever, then they send emails saying “we’ve bought abc.biz and we thought you might want it for $900″.

It’s almost as bad as those letters from Nominet demanding £90 for a .co.uk domain, when they cost about £6 on the open market. Disgraceful.

Anyone else had problems with this or heard of these snakes infringe on any trademarks?

Link Sponges

As a new addition to the made-up world of SEO parlance, I’d like to propose the term “Link Sponge”. I may be wrong in thinking there isn’t a phrase for this already, but here’s the definition:

• Link Sponge - a URL that is used to prettify an otherwise ugly URL, then 302 redirected to a longer URL. The webmaster who does this probably doesn’t consider:

  a) setting up a page at the location of the pretty URL
  b) redirecting the pretty URL properly
  c) setting up a URL rewrite so the user sees the pretty URL whilst the server is actually displaying the content from the ugly URL

Obviously (c) is the preferable option here.

So say a website sends out this “link sponge” URL (example.com/lovely) in a press release, gets a ton of backlinks for it, and resulting PageRank. Because they’ve 302′d the URL, the pretty URL soaks up all of the lovely link juice (see the sponge analogy here ), and passes the user along to the ugly URL (example.com/1234xSkgd.aspx).

Then maybe a year later, this website decides to restructure their website. They forget about the pretty URL they set up because they assume that they’re getting traffic to the ugly URL because it’s a good page. So they set up a spangly new URL, say example.com/sooo-lovely.aspx, and 302 the old page to this page (just because that’s the default in IIS/Apache), or maybe just delete it.

So the search engines follow all these great links to example.com/lovely and get a 302 chain of redirects or a 404 error. The webmaster wonders where all their traffic went. The link sponge then solidifies and sinks like a stone…

Firefox 3 gets off to a bad start

It looks like Mozilla’s Firefox Download Day has got off to a bad start - this was the picture at 1800 UK time (the exact time of release):

I’m guessing they’ve hit unprecedented traffic volumes, as there were a lot of people waiting for this. Conspiracy theorists might say that Microsoft probably set up a well-timed DDoS attack on Mozilla’s servers - for the purposes of any Microsoft lawyers, I’m not a conspiracy nut

Now, at 45 minutes after the planned release, Mozilla appears to have rolled back to Firefox 2…

Google Pagerank update

Google has updated their Pagerank reporting today - looks like Netvibes gets a nice bump up to from PR8 to PR9, along with Facebook getting the same increase from PR8 to PR9. Haven’t seen any big losers as yet…