At SES London I got chatting to someone who works for Louis Vuitton, I joked that I would never blog about the brand “Louis Vuitton” just incase the lawyers sued my fat lazy arse.. of course I was just joking around and the conversation turned to what I would do if I was Louis Vuitton …

Ok I know they are aggressive with trademarks so they should use ICann to grab domains and 301 them, in fairness I bet they are doing this but what they aren’t doing is bringing out standalone product launch sites :

Take the Louis Vuitton Damier Ebene Canvas range, it would be so easy to have a microsite for that range or on a url damierebene.LouisVuitton.com or even  www.damier-ebene.com. With the domain equity that they could pass the way the fashion media link, they could pop that for the terms “Louis Vuitton” and “damier ebene” closing a couple more top slots in the serps.

I reckon with a few months these results would look much better than this :

The red parts are replica bags suppliers !!

Secondly I would start link building out to sites that officially distribute the real bags.

Disclaimer : I don’t SEO, Work or have any association to Louis Vuitton, in fact I don’t even own a Vuitton product although I do like some of the Messenger bags …

Dave

DaveN

How often do you see this message on youtube when looking for channel 4 content:

This video contains content from Channel 4, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.

Just try this search you see the top results, click one if you’re in the UK and You Tube should show you the copyright message. Now Google owns YouTube, most readers here know that but I have a new following at the moment  ( did I tell you I’m going to be on SkyNews lol ) and just want to make that clear, so why the hell does Google YouTube block me when Google.com will quite happily show me the video in their Cache.

So what does Cache mean? This is the content that Google stores on it own servers, normally your content if you have a website, and to stop Google indexing that content you have to use robots.txt file to block Google’s spiders. Alot of newspapers actually block Google from caching their sites so they still have editorial control.
So the big question is why would Google honour a take down request on Youtube but still serve copyrighted content from it’s cache ?
Dave

DaveN

The BBC reported today that :

An Italian court has convicted three Google executives in a trial over a video showing a teenager with Down’s Syndrome being bullied.

Is it just me or is the screws of justice actually starting to turn, I know Google will appeal against this and David Drummond, chief legal officer at Google quoted that :

“I intend to vigorously appeal this dangerous ruling. It sets a chilling precedent,” he said.

“If individuals like myself and my Google colleagues who had nothing to do with the harassing incident, its filming or its uploading onto Google Video can be held criminally liable solely by virtue of our position at Google, every employee of any internet hosting service faces similar liability,” he added.

Personally I believe that Google need to start taking account of their actions. Last Monday on my radio show Strikepoint I kind of went on a large scale rant after Google again sent my children to places I don’t want them to go, which made me want to block Google from my home :

Seriously “best toys” is something my kids do search and I don’t want, or like the fact that Google is pushing them to Sex Toys..I have no reason for even letting them sign up for Gmail.

Dave

DaveN

Mostly, people from different fields love the chance to get into a pissing contest about which is the superior art. CSS is better than development… PPC is better than SEO…  MySQL is better than sex. You might notice however, that almost no-one says “**** is better than Analytics”.

SEO has its fair share of gurus, would-be gurus augmented by a smattering of charlatans and fools. Partly that’s because there’s a lot of ‘known unknowns’ in SEO which gives leeway for people to make unsubstantiated claims and parade around, chests puffed out claiming to the hardest man on the estate because they totally dominate this one market which is SO SECRET they can’t tell you.

Analytics to many is far less mysterious and therefore maybe less sexy. After all, the numbers are all there in black and white, so what you need to read the runes are patience, an eye for figures and statistical understanding. Consequently, there aren’t perhaps as many people talking puffery in the Analytics field – just people getting on and doing a great job. And yet as we discover with surprising frequency when we take on a new client, there is a metric tonne of stuff you can learn from just looking at your visitors without even starting to consider your headline rankings.

Anyway, Dave came back from SES London talking a lot about Brian Clifton, who is author of the book “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics“. He’s one of the most well respected Analytics experts around at the moment, along with Avinash Kaushik and Jim Sterne (the Godfather of Analytics).

In Dave’s opinion Avinash is one of the most well promoted of Analytics experts on the SEO blogs, but we love Brian the best cos he’s English (stand up, salute the flag, sing Rule Britannia etc) and in our opinion a damn smart guy.

The Gauntlet Has Been Thrown Down

Naturally enough given that Dave can never turn down a bet or challenge, a few drinks later him and Brian started a friendly competition over who can rank highest for the term “Google Analytics Book”. The thing is though, Brian is an Analytics expert, not an SEO. Here is the difference between an SEO and an analytics guru…

Brian hasn’t registered googleanalyticsbook.com or googleanalyticsbook.co.uk! But we have!

Brian has written an update to his first Google Analytics book and the second edition is due to be released next month (March 2010 if you’re reading this post from the future!). Anyways, Brian has sent us a sneak preview of chapters 1 and 10, as well as the foreword by Avinash, and I must say, it is not only interesting but I can see how it could really be valuable to a lot of people. Basically it provides a number of ways of using Google Analytics, largely to improve conversion rates, but also to measure various metrics etc. Here is a sneak preview of what is in the book:

Part I: Measuring Success

• Chapter 1: Why Understanding Your Web Traffic Is Important to Your Business
• Chapter 2: Available Methodologies and Their Accuracy
• Chapter 3: Google Analytics Features, Benefits and Limitations

Part II: Using Google Analytics Reports

• Chapter 4: Using the Google Analytics Interface
• Chapter 5: Reports Explained

Part III: Implementing Google Analytics

• Chapter 6: Getting Up and Running with Google Analytics
• Chapter 7: Advanced Implementation
• Chapter 8: Best-Practices Configuration Guide
• Chapter 9: Google Analytics Hacks

Part IV: Using Visitor Data to Drive Website Improvement

• Chapter 10: Focusing on Key Performance Indicators
• Chapter 11: Real-World Tasks
• Chapter 12: Integrating Google Analytics with Third-Party Applications

So he starts off with an introduction, telling you why you should take analytics so seriously, then he goes on to Google Analytics and runs you through everything, to make sure you know how it works etc. then he goes on to show you how to apply it (including explaining those darned Motion Charts!) He then goes through how to setup Google Analytics properly, so you get all the data like AdWords/AdSense and URL tagging ad campaigns from email etc.

Then he starts to go into the real money makers, defining KPI’s – linking analytics to real world tasks, tracking offline marketing etc. He also introduces Google Website Optimizer and getting started doing multivariate testing, finally he talks about integrating Google Analytics with Third-Party Applications and Call tracking.

Some people will you tell that it’s all about the traffic, but you could also make the case that it’s all about the conversions. Analytics guys love tables, so here’s a demonstration.

Why You Should Buy This Google Analytics Book by Brian

So in the grand scheme of things, this book suddenly looks a lot more appealing, right? OK so the above example is fake, but to achieve the same effect through traffic alone you’d have to double traffic, instantly. That’s quite difficult to do with established sites, so if you want to increase profits from your site’s existing traffic, pre-order Brian’s book on Amazon now (not an affiliate link )

Recently we’ve done a few interesting things with Google Analytics, but as you’d expect from an SEO one of them was How to use Google Analytics Annotations to secretly tell people you hate them and using Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation to measure qualified visits. We’ve also more recently used Google Analytics to measure average page speed times. We’re still collecting data on this at the moment to see how strongly it correlates with rankings.

Analytics as part of SEO

If you’re diligently checking your rankings every morning but not stopping to look at what visitors are actually doing on your site then really, you’re wasting half the benefit that SEO has probably delivered. You’ve spent the last year chasing that #1spot for “tights for men” and think that now you’re there you can just relax and watch the spondoolies roll in.

Bong!

If your bounce rate is 70% for that term, you’ve got problems and opportunities. Black and white stats prove that either your keyword choice was wrong or you have problems with your presentation or price point. If you’re not looking at that stuff then the person at two or three is the one making more from their ranking.

David Whitehouse

It’s pretty evident that any ranking signal that Google uses creates value where previously there was none. Links, for example, change hand for cash – no matter how hard Google tries to stuff that particular genie back in the bottle. Google said that ranking was partly determined by links and so everything quickly boiled down to what individual links are worth.

The same holds true for domain names. A domain itself is worth a couple of quid, as any fool knows. But any fool will also tell you that people search for brands and that online brands are almost without exception tied in with a domain name.

So Google has to try and figure out what the intent is behind any search term. Is someone looking for a brand? A domain? General information about a subject? And where do those three things often converge? A keyword domain.

Taken together, that gives Google a powerful impetus to rank keyword domains. Search for something like ‘ghd’. With the exception of eBay and Amazon, the top results all have ‘ghd’ in their domain name – and you can probably think of similar examples in markets you know. As with links, that creates a premium for domains – a story that dates all the way back to that epic, multi-million dollar, decade-long battle for sex.com.

So will the purchase of the poker.org domain prove to be money well spent?

Well any such strategy is basically an attempt to short circuit the long hard slog that’s necessary to establish a proper brand. When you’re a brand, you’re almost exempt from the normal requirements of an SEO campaign. I could point you right now to sites with a first place ranking for pretty competitive keywords. Those keywords bring a fraction of the traffic that branded searches do. And the rankings themselves are in the face of poor on-site optimisation, no content and a barely-there backlink profile. The conclusion has to be that – pace Vince – brand is a big factor in ranking.

That makes a brand a far more powerful thing to have than a keyword domain. Taking the example of the poker market, someone like 888 will happily buy out another brand to get a lockdown on the market. The top 10 isn’t full of keyword domains – but a variety of brands. And f***ing Wikipedia, of course. This dominance by brand makes it difficult for keyword domains to easily slip into the top 10 as if by right.

Once the buyers of poker.org start linkbuilding, they will have natural keyword anchor text for most of their links, but the same could have been said about many of other domain names they could have chosen. One thing they have got is headlines about their purchase. No doubt that newspaper editors and bloggers are unthinkingly handing out headlines and keyword links to the domain – which in itself begins to create a brand. Hell, I’m contributing to that right now myself.

In the final analysis, like any other strategy buying a keyword domain will only take you so far. You still have to establish authority, backlinks, content and brand presence to rank in competitive fields. If you’ve got a million bucks to spare, there’s a lot of ways you could use it to get what you want beyond just sinking it into a domain name. Like give us a ring, for example

paul carpenter