Bobbie Johnson write a fun piece for the Guardian, in which he tries to optimize for a phrase that doesn’t exist much on the web: eco-friendly flip-flops. SkepticalMatt wants to point out that while [eco-friendly flip-flops] has 11,700 results, there are currently less than ten unique results for the actual phrase ["eco-friendly flip-flops"], and four of those are related to this experiment, so this niche isn’t ultra-competitive. 
But HolidayMatt just wishes Bobbie well with his non-existent product that features “zero harmful emissions” (does foot-stinkiness count as a harmful emission?).
P.S. I’m totally going to pwn the SkepticalMatt niche. w00t!
{ 27 comments… read them below or add one }
There were 3 sites ranking for “eco-friendly flip-flops” before Bobbie posted it in his blog and created ecofriendlyflipflops.co.uk so it was a lame experment to try to claim the use of black hat “tricks” to get it to top position.
His black hat “tricks” were some content spam (keyword stuffing the content and hidden text) and link spam (creating another site to provide links to ecofriendlyflipflops.co.uk). But what is more amazing then the lameness of the whole project was he called these pratices unscrupulous, unethical and shady.
I was surprised the Guardian published it on their site.
[QUOTE]
But what is more amazing then the lameness of the whole project was he called these pratices unscrupulous, unethical and shady.
I was surprised the Guardian published it on their site.[/QUOTE]
Coming from our left wing Guardanista paper, he’s just described their editorial policy to a T.
But there again, it’s the ideal paper to read if you want a £35/$55,000 a year job as an “Outreach real nappy advisor”…. in other words talking to new and expectant mums about the ecological benefit of using old-fashioned towelling nappies/diapers instead of the disposable ones.
This is sad, even Matt’s resorting to me-too news when he IS the news
Good morning X-Mas-Matt
WOW.. Now I can earn some $$$ by manipulating Google
PS. talking about going to bed with competitors.
The folks are talking about moving to an office downtown in the same building that this youngster has an office too. I said no..no please. I don’t wish to start my days by watching a “walking talking red blazer”
IncrediBILL, I try to balance talking about new/different things and doing original posts vs. posting often enough to make the site worth visiting. I can’t be uniquely insightful all the time.
Fair point though.
Matt, how about about a post exposing Google’s ranking algo
I can guarantee your Blogg would become to most popular on the Planet!
[quote if this worked]I was surprised the Guardian published it on their site.[/but it doesn't seem to]
Worse, this was actually published in the Newspaper – on Page 11 no less. Even more ridiculous was his description of the Google Dance being the battle between SEOs and Google – could he have DONE any less research?!?!
They’ve got a big first-page article in today’s IT supplement about the Google / AOL buy too, wrongly (in my opinion) reasoning that AOL will be getting better rankings because of it.
Henry
Badly researched article with lots of wrong facts in UK paper – SHOCKER!
Lucky they spelt Google name correct IMO – typical UK article would be something like Google (age 7) was founded by Harry Page (29) and Dave Brin (76) in a shed in the North Pole.
Stephen, and then Clarkson (from Top Gear) would say that “It is, by far, the best search engine… of the World”. LOL
There’s an “interesting” discussion on the journalists blog in the comments section:
Bobbie Johnson’s Blog
Makes for some interesting and amusing reading.
Dan
It is kinda one of SEO law. Any non-relevant SERPs (due to non-existant nature of keyphraces or very low ammount of authentic ones over accident word’s orders in index) could be easy to affect. But only until some margin of non-relevance of the whole index for such keyphrace.
PetsMart not so Smart or are they?…..
The tactic that was done by the Guardian is the same one that PetsMart is using on thier sister site. It has been this way for a long time. Do big companies get special treatment? Yes, a complaint was sent and many many times.
http://shop.statelinetack.com
There’s nothing wrong with getting a page to try to move it up to #1 for a non-relevant keyprhase.
I have a few sites that have done that. It’s where I got the idea for a “slang translator” from.. and it took off.
Using the overture / google bid tools and google suggest is how I come up with alot of my website ideas. I look for what people are searching for, and build something to fit their needs.
wait, he said he created 1 site with a bunch of links to it and that worked?
That doesn’t make sense.
Hmm
I thought the article was a bit poorly done and could spark a backlash. if we are unlucky (ime thinking of an MP on the make here)
They do have some good people mainly the observer side I got hammered by one of the Gruniads Journos back in the day when i used to suport X.400 email – JS slaged of my service when He hadn’t installed dos6 proprly.
Rgds Maurice
Now that the surface appears to be cleared I am still dealing with all kinds of personal compliance issues. I’m turning off ping services on my non blog blogs, I just put in missing metatags that the so called experts said “don’t matter” well, I am not even getting found in Yahoo, metatags don’t friggin matter???
I also tried out a service called pingoat.com that pings services, guess what? It instantly put me on a blacklist of so called friggin “splogs” for using the tool then made me signup for their god damn forum to tell them to fix it (they didn’t, i’m now on a god damn splog list!
AND lunarpages is currently under a DoS attack.
This is the year I stop listening to you people and start doing it my own way. When I started listening I started losing…
Do I sound bitter? Damn right!
Yeah, I stopped listening to people too Aaron, and I’ve had great results.
No tricks, no gimicks, just make a site with the visitor in mind, follow w3c and accessibility guidlines, and boom good rankings.
I’ve got 2 fun “experiments in white hat seo” or so I call them, that I’m going to be staring in the next few days on some new domain names I purchased.
I’ll let you know about them when I start them (hopefully soon)
ROFLMAO @ Aaron
That’s what you get for being lazy and not implementing your own ping service but I’m the DIY type and like to know how everything works.
However, I trust very few 3rd party web sites unless I get referrals from other sites I trust which is why I never even heard of their service – good thing it seems!
Now if Matt could just explain why Yahoo seems to be indexing circles around Google, on a google property (blogger) no less, that would be a nice xmas gift.
[b]Henry Elliss[/b]:
>>>>Even more ridiculous was his description of the Google Dance being the battle between SEOs and Google – could he have DONE any less research?!?!
I am guessing he was doing a play on works on that one. Lets grand him that much.
>>>>They’ve got a big first-page article in today’s IT supplement about the Google / AOL buy too, wrongly (in my opinion) reasoning that AOL will be getting better rankings because of it.
Well according to [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/technology/16cnd-aol.html?hp&\1\1ex=1134795600&\1\1en=00497831ec792f06&\1\1ei=5094&\1\1partner=homepage]nytimes.com[/url] it’s true.
“Finally, around 9 p.m., Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner told Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, that he would accept Google’s recently sweetened offer. Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.”
Perhaps Matt whats to confirm or deny this report for us. Looks like AOL bought ranking juice for their domain.
Shades of “nigritude ultramarine” (if I spelled it right)?
(Kill the other one Matt).
Henry Elliss:
>>>>Even more ridiculous was his description of the Google Dance being the battle between SEOs and Google – could he have DONE any less research?!?!
I am guessing he was doing a play on works on that one. Lets grand him that much.
>>>>They’ve got a big first-page article in today’s IT supplement about the Google / AOL buy too, wrongly (in my opinion) reasoning that AOL will be getting better rankings because of it.
Well according to nytimes.com it’s true.
“Finally, around 9 p.m., Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner told Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, that he would accept Google’s recently sweetened offer. Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.”
Perhaps Matt whats to confirm or deny this report for us. Looks like AOL bought ranking juice for their domain.
RE: “Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.”
Oh dear! Looks like Google has become like any other public company, that is, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
It’s a realy pity and is likely to be the thin edge of the wedge!
Hey Matt,
I too think google sitemaps is great. I have one suggestion however that I think everyone will agree is pretty helpful.
Could we get the time of the crawling errors that are logged? I sometimes have some load issues on my webserver and would like to know if its related at all. Also server reboots happen at 3am once a week and I would like to know if thats a cause as well for the unreachable errors. I wasnt able to find a spot to email sitemaps directly about this suggestion ..
Keep up the great work!
Happy Holidays!
mike, I passed your suggestion on to the Sitemaps team. I don’t know how hard it would be to add, but thanks for mentioning it.
Matt,
Not sure if this is exactly relavant to this threaed but check out this work-around a site has been using via JavaScript:
document.write(’var s1=\”window.loca\”;var s2=\”tion=\’http://www.some\”;var s3=\”site.com/index.html\’\”;eval(s1+s2+s3);’);
So they include a statement like this in the HEAD:
script language=”JavaScript” src=”docs/browseinf.js” /script
which contains the above JS. The original page is LOADED with keywords in the title, via ALT tags, and any link names to other pages on the site to these “meta redirects” contain actual keywords that users might search with. These guys have been getting away with this for at least 2 years…wget this URL to see what I mean:
http://www.centralcommand.com/
Kydd
Make a good site and leave the rest to “nature”. At times trying to make a perfect site just creates more problems.
I came here searching for eco-friendly flip-flops… You mean these things don’t exist??