I'm talking about the Guardian's recent football (soccer) application called the Guardian Chalkboard. It's an online application which has data from the past three years for every premiership football match, as well as info about tackles, passes, shots, throw-ins, etc for every single player! That's an incredible amount of data, and it allows you to draw virtual chalkboards and compare matches and players. In the words of Blue Peter, here's one I made earlier:
by Guardian Chalkboards
This is on the very basic end of the spectrum, but you get the idea. This kind of content is very nicely packaged up - the interface for creating them is slick. In short, it just works. And I suspect they're going to be raking in the benefits from this for a long time to come, not only in links, but also in coverage and branding. Every football forum, blog or site will be talking about this in the coming weeks if they haven't already, and that's worth more than just the links they'll get out of it.
That said, I wouldn't be the SEO I am if I didn't do a little critique of the online implementation, so firstly here are some of the things I really like about the chalkboard:
- It's slick. The interface just works (barring a few tiny niggles, see below). There are very few barriers to creating a chalkboard and the whole process takes only 1 or 2 minutes (and that included me signing up for an account as well - now I have an account creating one will take no time at all). That's not say, of course, that you can't spend hours playing with the data if you want to!! Mmmm. Data.
- It's well integrated into the rest of the site. Take a look at their individual team pages (here's the Arsenal page) - nice and prominent is a link to the chalkboard application.
- Widgets! There are widgets! You can embed them! They have an html link back to the Guardian site! Tick, tick and tick again. I do love widgets.
- Virality. There's a call to action from each board to make your own or comment on the current one. Both of these things really encourage users to engage with the content, and engagement is the key to virality.
- Prizes. As if football fanatics really need an incentive to play with the data, the Guardian are also giving away signed premier league shirts to the best chalkboards.
- Social. Each chalkboard is open to comments, which generates discussion, and opinion, which is key to helping word about chalkboards. Encourage healthy discussion wherever possible. Each chalkboard appears on your own user profile page (here's mine) as well. Sure, the profile pages are a little bare but the idea is there.
- Unique URL for each chalkboard - this is basic, but you'd be surprised at how many people get this wrong!
- And last but not least, they deliver what they say they would. This is crucial to success and they seem to have done it well. Nothing about the process frustrated or confused me - the data seemed solid. Well done, the Guardian
- Too much flash. The application needs to be in flash - but I'm not sure I like the large flash used to explain the whole process. It causes the call to action to create a chalkboard appear below the fold. In fact, the call to action isn't even on the page when the flash first loads - it fades in! Not to mention the lack of link juice. I know, it's not a big thing but personally I don't like it.
- Certain pages (which appear to be used for aiding spiderability) appear on the www.guardianchalkboards.com site (e.g., this page: https://www.guardianchalkboards.com/clubchalkboards.aspx?clubname=arsenal). This seems unnecessary to me and it would be worth migrating all of this onto the main site. Again, this is probably a dev issue.
- The share code is poorly implemented - if you click 'share' on the widget, it takes you to a generic page full of Digg and reddit links. I think the chance of this page going hot on Digg or reddit is minuscule. I mean, most of the US doesn't even know what soccer is, let alone care about individual boards. I think this could be vastly improved by targeting the media people ARE likely to share them on, such as email (there's no easy way of emailing multiple people about your chalkboard and there's no tracking of how many emails are sent), Facebook, etc. Since forums are big business in the football industry, I think it would be great to offer a 'lite' embed code which is pre-formatted for forums and just shows an image of the chalkboard and links through so that people can embed them all over the place.
- Copy and paste. This is a small gripe but it really annoys me and is the only thing that actually frustrated me about the whole process - trying to copy the code for the chalkboard is really difficult. There is no godly reason why the embed code shouldn't a) auto-highlight, b) auto-copy onto your clipboard, and c) there should be a button to copy the code onto your clipboard. Forcing users to select and copy and paste is a barrier and a completely unnecessary one. IMHO.
- While there's loads of links to share, the chalkboard there isn't a perma-link field anywhere. I think this should definitely be in there - it's easy enough to copy and paste the address bar, but that's a barrier. No barriers! Also, where's the integration with twitter? Perma-links are ideal for pasting into Twitter.
- Yay links! It's great that there's a flat HTML link in the widget, but how about a second link to the actual chalkboard? It gets the Guardian a second link and is actually very user-friendly, as this drives you to go to the page and comment and interact with the board.
- Title tags. Title tags, title tags, title tags. There's probably not a lot they WANT to rank for with these chalkboards, but there's no reason why the title tags shouldn't be unique. After all, these pages are going to get links, and pages that have links are able to rank for things. Especially for a site like the Guardian, where page views and ad revenue is what it's all about.
Disclaimer: The Guardian aren't a client, I just really liked the chalkboard and felt compelled to blog about it!
Huh? Football has throwins? I don't get it. ;) (kidding) I grew up with soccer/football. Some of us Americans know about the communist sport (as our high school trainer used to call it). Our teams locker rooms were under the vistor's side of the stadium, and American football regularly stole and tore up our fields, but I'm not bitter.
Oh, this site is about SEO? Sorry Rand. Okay, yes, loved the SEO part of the post too. :)
This comment was so offside.
You're lucky they still don't use the video referee
I can see this application being ported to baseball, one of the most stats driven sports around (second of course to English Football).Is anyone from MLB reading this? ?
Soccer is so far from my thoughts I thought at first glance it was a basketball court. DOH!
Ha, love it! A basketball court!
Wrong, its a football court
On the subject of football teams and SEO, I noticed that man utd have disappeared from the google.co.uk results when you tick 'pages from the uk'. Google must be taken the club's american ownership seriously ...:
https://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/man-utd-not-uk-club-says-google/
lol. They don't seem to be vry bothered to act on that. There's a previous post here at moz from W. on how to get that one right.
Oh, talking about things right, this one will probably get me booked but it's worth for the sake of getting facts straight:
https://storage.joejet.com/photos/000227/joejet.com_000227-58_assorted-images_mini.jpg
(Drooling) Sweet..... (more drool)... Go Tottenham.... (more drool)... I am in love.... (more drool)..... Best link bait ever. Back to our regular programming at SEOMoz.
I would love to see this be used for the NBA.
So, the phrase used to mean "Content is King of Search", but clearly this is not an example of that...
1. They rank #1 for Chalkboards if you limit your search to GB/UK --- I don't see that helping them out very much.
2. They appear to have few if any rankings for Football related searches.
Content is king of viral marketing, certainly; and it helps that the Guardian can monetize this traffic with CPM advertising. But for search, the link is still king.
I'll change my mind when you can show me how to rank a site with no links. We can already rank a site with no content.
Nice find. A good example of how the UK print media is staying relevant online. The newspaper dinosaurs here in the States need to learn from across the pond. https://www.nexpider.com https://www.nexpider.com
this is an example of how the phrase 'content is king' has evolved - before it was mostly aimed at straight text, now it can be anything - youtube clips, flash apps or some handy wordpress widget.
its great to see companies like the guardian making an investment (id be curious to know exactly how many dev hours and $$ investment the chalkboard cost) in creating usable apps that the average punters really want - best way to build traffic!
it reminds me of 80::20 rule .Surely content is 80% and thn do whateevr you can for rest 20%
Great idea but I am going to add to the criticism on the implementation.
1. Any viral content the links should use a subdomain or dedicated domain with 301 redirects.
This allows
a) You to redirect to a different location easily - vital iffor some reason you need to clean up your link profile or change ranking priorities
b) Track effectively
c) Split test landing pages specific to viral traffic
2. The embed code needs some work with nested objects, images etc
3. The html links should be in the nested objects as if someone can see the flash, they don't need the HTML.
I were getting a bad link on the above url - at first i thought it were cos i'm based in Yorkshire and we all know you don't get football in Yorkshire but then i discovered this link https://www.guardian.co.uk/football/chalkboards.
Great link tool. Imagine if Gary LInkear starts using it on Saturday night at 10:40?
That is a ton of info. I don't understand how this is possible compared to a few years ago.
Thanks for this post Tom! As a fairly recent newcomer to the blog, I love how I can just continue to read each new post, and still learn an over-abundance of SEO tips that veterans of the blog learned long ago. It's not necessary to search back through old posts to learn new tips and tricks (though quite recommended). Items I learned from this post alone: 1. Email to friend links are still good. 2. Widgets are a great way to get links back to your content. 3. Copy/Paste needs to be made simple when it's an important function of the site. On another note, I'm quite jealous of The Guardian! I'll have to work on creating a site so compelling and well thought that you're irresistibly drawn to give me a free analysis of what's good and what needs to be improved ;-). And one final technical note: If it's helpful at all, note that the comment box appears behind the embedded flash chalkboards if you scroll up to that point in the page. Probably not worth fixing, but something I'd want to know as a web developer.
Grgisme, I think you should consider the context in which those things work: the Guardian is a huge brand (might not seem that way for people in the U.S., but in Europe it's huge, even for us non-brits) so releasing something like this had a lot of marketing leeway. Can you picture the same application have similar success if released on a half-unkowned football website?
So yeah, in this case the application/widget is a great way to get links, but only because of the brand it sits on and its usefulness and uniqueness.
Football chalkboard aside the points you've raised about what is wrong with it can be applied to most flash applications - no perma links, too much flash when text will suffice, easy copy paste needed, unique title (and presumably meta description) tags.
Oh and also I'm having trouble finding the Palace v Sheff Utd match from 2007, oh wait 'Premiership only', what a load of rubbish...
nice, but seriously bad article if bandwidth is an issue... nice work on the co-branded articles!
Damn this is awesome. I've already shared it with a bunch of my friends as well. I hope they are planning on adding all Champions League team's data as well!
I bet they are going to add that data. So this piece of content is highly scalable as well.
I'm seeing that is has 365 links to the main page as of today. I can see them getting tens of thousands of links if/when they start adding additional leagues.
I found this the other day and shared it with loads of my slavering football lovgin friends - it is a genius piece of content. I can't believe copy and paste is so hard though - wtf Guardian?
Nice find. A good example of how the UK print media is staying relevant online. The newspaper dinosaurs here in the States need to learn from across the pond.