According to a direct message I got on Twitter from moneysupermarket.com founder Simon Nixon the preeminent price comparison site nets him a cool $500 a day.
The company floated a couple of years ago with a valuation of £1 billion – looks like the recessions hit em hard:-)
You might be expecting to get let down by such a spamtastic blog post title but I will really show you how to get thousands (actually unlimited) links from a PR9 domain. However this post isn’t really about a stupid link trick, it’s about the inherent flaws in all types of quantitative link data research. But you’re probably not going to read down that far anyway so don’t worry!
Sweet links dude!
At a panel we did for the DPA conference yesterday I mentioned it was possible to get dofollow links from Facebook pages or profiles. This has been possible for a fair while using numerous Facebook apps but as soon as slightly backdoor tactics to get links from prominent sites start getting talked about at conferences or showing up on Seomoz you know they’re not going to last long anyway. We’ve seen this lately with Twitter closing out dofollow links through applications and more recently Dave Naylor’sFlickr comment trick getting ‘fixed’
Last week Google announced they were testing the use of ‘Jump to’ links in snippets, which direct users to the part of the page which is most relevant for a particular query using named anchors within the page. Richard at Seogadget has a nice write up of how Google is using these links and how you can go about influencing them.
Basically, Google is latching onto id names within the markup of a page. i.e. www.mydomain.com#my-named-anchor.
The problem is a lot of javascript/ ajax scripts also use the # tag in the url and named anchors to trigger actions within the content of the page and Google might not be filtering these properly from the pages which use named anchors in the traditional way to jump to parts of the page.
As an example the FLA’s car finance guide triggers the ‘Jump to’ links on this query:
When will the recession end? That’s the billion dollar question at the moment. We don’t have an answer for that I’m afraid, but we do have some advice that will ensure that when things do improve, you’ll be in a better position than before the world went mad.
Even if we don’t know quite when, we know that at some point the economic downturn will upturn and things will start to get better. When it happens it may well happen quickly in your industry, and for the companies best placed to capitalise on the return to consumer (and B2B) spending, it could be the next gold rush.
So I wondered with all the links going to Facebook pages (and groups, profiles etc) which amount to about 800 million according to Site Explorer how many people are blindly copy pasting urls with tracking variables like the ?ref=mf attached?
This is a little Google Analytics hack I came up with the other day. Its not exactly a ‘robust’ solution but it might be useful for somebody!
The idea is to turn Analytics into a database for your email newsletter subscription list (or any other form where you want to collect a basic list of email addresses) .
Usually this will be done in one of three ways:
1. Integrate your web form with your CRM system- the best solution but can be tricky/ expensive to setup 2. Store the emails in a web based database then export them later – simple but requires a database and some sort of server side coding i.e. PHP 3. Send an email to yourself with the addresses each time someone signs up- pretty easy using CGI’s but can be a real pain to manage if you have a lot of subscribers.
With this hack all you need is a few lines of javascript and a Google Analytics account- simples:-)
I’ve got the firefox hack which makes links glow pink when they’ve got nofollow on them.
Recently I’ve been seeing pink in some strange places where nofollow really isn’t needed, including some pages which are behind passwords so they would never be seen by engines anyway.
Here, yell.com are nofollowing 1 internal link in their secure ad management area, why?
No need for Wordtracker to be nofollowing the link to Google results in their keyword tool that I can think of:
Do Yahoo not trust Wikipedia enough to link to them without nofollow in these wikipedia sitelinks - even though Yahoo search result pages are blocked by robots.txt?!
Is there another reason to use nofollow that I’m missing or have you seen rogue nofollow links? Let us know in the comments.
Posted by John in News on May 11th, 2009 12 Comments
It might be a temporary glitch but I’ve noticed Big Mouth (who historically rank extremely well on some competitive terms) seem to have been dropped for a number of big money terms like search engine optimisation and affiliate marketing. I’m pretty sure they were on page 1 for these last week.
Interestingly it looks like the homepage has been completely removed from the cache which makes me think this might be a temporary problem.
The company floated a couple of years ago with a valuation of £1 billion – looks like the recessions hit em hard:-)
