I watch the 'Movers and Shakers' feature of Blogscape somewhat obsessively -- both to research Blogscape's quality of data and to keep up with the latest trends in the fast-moving web.
Yesterday, I noticed that the number one fastest rising subdomain for last week was blog.indecisionforever.com.
I clicked on the term, and the following graph revealed that there was, indeed, a large spike in links to blog.indecisionforever.com that week.
I clicked on the data point for '3/13/09' (the big spike) to see where these links where coming from, and found that they all seemed to be from blog posts about Jon Stewart's recent interview of Jim Cramer.
However, when I clicked through to a few of the highest ranking posts that had this link, I couldn't actually find the link on the page.
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Each page linked to a video of the interview, but the video was hosted at a third party content distribution site, not blog.indecisionforever.com. Where was it?
Finally, I realized where the link was: dark grey letters on a light grey background, right underneath the video link itself. I checked each page, and sure enough, that's where it was on all of them -- I assume it's added automatically when you include a link to the video.
Oh, and the anchor text? It seems like someone is trying to make Comedy Central's blog post about the interview rank for the phrase "Jim Cramer"...
Amazing catch Chas, and nice use of Blogscape! I think that's a really smart campaign from Comedy Central and great use of embeddable content to get links with the right anchor text - practically a case study in effective white hat link building using embeddable widgets!
How well did it work? Well, according to rank checker:
Google : page 2, position:#9
Yahoo : not found in the top 100
Microsoft: not found in the top 100
It would be interesting to know how it ranked during the link spike, as closer to then it was likely ranking higher...
Interesting article, highlights the trend towards using social media for traffic and SEO. It's an area I'm learning about, but it does seem quite short lived but effective in this short period - would doing this help your site look more realitive and thus be positive in terms of SEO?
Interesting article, highlights the trend towards using social media for traffic and SEO. It's an area I'm learning about, but it does seem quite short lived but effective in this short period - would doing this help your site look more realitive and thus be positive in terms of SEO?
Sometimes I think that a link distribution like the one you show here (pretty much no new links and then a huge spike) is really bad for SEO. But then I think about how news stories are. The HOT stuff really does hit the Internet like that. There *will* be a huge spike for a news story of-the-day... So it strikes me that the SE must have a hard time with this pattern.
On the one hand, their anti-spam routines would want to discount this type of spike as a manipulation. On the other hand, they would want to race this type of content to the top under the assumption that the acceleration of inbound links means it's "HOT".
Two sets of rules? Extra scrutiny of the sources of links when the pattern looks like this? Must be...
My SEO brain says you don't really want a pattern like this for a client. Unless they are in the news business...
What an awesome find, great post!
That link color is pretty similar to the background color it sits in.
I downloaded a wordpress theme which had a link back to the author in the footer that was extremely close to the background color. It was similar to the link below the video except the background was the darker color.
Anyway, I set up the blog with Google Webmaster Tools and got a couple links to get it indexed. Google found the blog, I checked webmaster tools and there was a brite red Warning waiting for me. I looked through the site and noticed the link, changed the color; after next googlebot crawl- the warning dissapeared, and my blog was indexed.
Hopefully that link doesn't trigger Google's Wrath on the sites embedding the video.
Interesting. In what might be an attempt to "trick" people using the template to leave the backlink in place, the creator of the template effectively devalued any backlinks because Google saw it as a hidden text link.
We've been developing a video linking strategy, and this is a wonderful and interesting idea! Thanks so much for the share, I'll have to see if we can do something similar to get some link juice off of our video content. Thanks, and great catch!
Oh wow. This just gave me an idea for one of my clients! Thank you.
Agree with Filipe - and have to say hats off to the CC folks. I work with companies on innovative ways to use social media and marketing to generate both traffic and improve SEO. These kinds of tools are evolving. Thanks for pointing another one out.
The new tool is a great blackhat tactic finder as well as discovery of great link bait campaigns. Google should create a similar tool to punish all the evil doers I guess.... :-p
Do you think it would have ranked higher that quickly ? The broadcast took place. Video posted. People embedded video. Google finds embedded link. Google needs to return to find link again 1-2 times ? Granted on a blog posting that may be daily.. or 2-3 x per week ?
Still by the time it would rank you talk about 1-2 weeks later ? Would it still be that hot by that time ?
Or have you seen those type of campaigns where ranking occurred instantly ? (Aside from the first 2-3 days honeymoon you always get from G)
Nice find. Definately link bait from the folks over at Comedy Central. Not a bad way to go when you've got content and brand appeal and need something new to rank quickly...
interesting...
Thumbed down because your comment is not interesting . . .
Comment deleted (kind of)
I was talking about thumbing up the guy that thumbed down, but it didn't come out right (its hard to communicate online sometimes :)
We've got a paradox. Tim's comment is interesting if Zevu's comment is not interesting. But Tim's comment, if it is interesting, also makes Zevu's comment interesting.
We may have the core of a proof of the incompatibility of completeness and consistency. Oh Gödel.
I think we can get out of it if we just call my comment "not interesting," rather, just explanitory and consistent with my new personal thumb down policy - nobody gets a thumb down from me without comment, even in painfully obvious situations like the one above.
I dont write the comments for you, i write my opinions for the author. And therefore stop your f$cking thumbing down my comments. ok? or i will do what u do!
Zevu, your comment implies that you think I gave you all 11 thumbs down, I did not. All I did was explain why I gave you my one thumb down. You might choose to use that to understand why you received thumbs down from multiple other people rather than getting heated and retaliatory towards one person.
It's not a terribly complicated system: you post a comment in an open forum, people read that comment and decide to thumb up/down or not thumb at all. Your comment didn't add any value so I thumbed you down along with 10 other people who may or may not have felt the same way. Then I left a comment letting you know why you received a thumb down from me, so as to help you understand why you received the thumb down. I was not trying to be an a$$, rather, I was trying to help you understand why you received the thumb down.
And if you choose to 'do what I do' as you indicate in your comment, you will find yourself trying to make more thoughtful comments that actually contribute to the value of the post and give this community a reason to thumb you up rather than down.
Just my $0.02
I know very well what u mentioned above, and why did u wrote that comment and know that 11 different people thumbed me down. But after your comment i got 40 thumbs down in just 3 days in different posts. u actually broke my reputation here. i think after that whenever i will comment everyone will say "oh again this stupid man, lets thumb him down, haha" . anyway, forget it.
@zevu, I thumbed you down because I find your angry outbursts to be quite entertaining, and I'm trying to invoke an encore performance.
And if you choose to 'do what I do' as you indicate in your comment, you will find yourself trying to make more thoughtful comments that actually contribute to the value of the post and give this community a reason to thumb you up rather than down. LOL! Great line. I find that insulting other people is always sweeter when you compliment yourself at the same time. The 2 together seem to have some kind of positive synergistic effect on my mood.