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How Often Does One Thing Lead To Another? The Search For ‘Marketing Ireland’
So a short thread on IrishWebMasterForum.com about in-house SEM led me to the following SERP, which in turn led me to one of the least usable jobs sites I’ve seen in yonks (prime future target for some serious ‘dismantling’), on which I found this job vacancy gem:
I’m not so sure how much a European pound is worth, but the pitch is quite well crafted:
Responsibilities:
None. We are not very responsible and don’t expect you to be. We do expect common sense and nothing too rude.
Nothing too strenuous in that job spec.
Critical Mass
On a serious note, the really difficult part of starting a Social Media community site is gathering enough momentum to gain critical mass. Low activity generally translates into low stickiness, and in turn makes it very difficult to attract new users. It’s a very tough task to get right, and without active users this type of site is dead in the water.
I have to applaud these guys for trying something different to spur membership.
I wish them the best of luck with it.
would it kill them to run a spellchecker over it?…mutter…grumble
Comment by andrew — March 6, 2007 @ 2:02 am
Words of a publisher
Comment by Richard Hearne — March 6, 2007 @ 9:02 am
That “least usable job sites” link was a page created by “that” company to promote Jobs.ie.
They won the contract for the online marketing of the website and used their own PR to help boost the other websites traffic. They do the same with hotels. Have a look at 9th result.
Nasty piece of blackhat I would say!
Comment by Tom Doyle — March 9, 2007 @ 12:40 pm
I came across them earlier for ‘wine shop ireland‘. #2.
The only thing is I don’t see any benefit here – they’re simply canabalising their clients serps. Te wine shop isn’t anywhere to be found on that query or ‘wine online’.
Check out ‘wine online ireland‘. There they are at #4 and the client site nowhere to be found.
Nothing wrong with pushing their PR per-se. But from what I can see it’s not doing clients any good. I wonder are the client sites using Adwords campaigns?
Comment by Richard Hearne — March 9, 2007 @ 1:06 pm
“I wonder are the client sites using Adwords campaigns?”
You can bet your a$$ they are! WT have been doing this for as long as I can remember.
I agree there is nothing wrong with pushing their PR, we do it, but it has to be used in conjunction with a proper organic link building campaign.
Comment by Dave Davis — March 9, 2007 @ 3:54 pm
Before I continue, I think it’s only fair to say…. I used to work with WT in a senior role and was basically there when it was only myself and the MD – so I don’t want to come across as being bitter – I’m not, I simply feel that some of the techniques they use are things I don’t agree with, hence one of the reasons for making a new start!
Anyway!! I don’t think it’s fair or eithical for sites with high PR to have doorway pages to other sites. In effect, that’s exactly what the jobs page is. When you do a search, it’s not as if it uses an api or that WT are making money from this. The only reason for this page is to generate traffic from search engines as part of their online marketing campaign.
If we were all to do this, the web would be full of SEO companies websites at the top of the search engines, leading traffic into client sites – is that the way we want to see search results? Would we be then calling this spamming? I know I would….
Comment by Tom Doyle — March 9, 2007 @ 4:25 pm
Top, you are right and I fully agree. WT are doing just this. What I meant was that we do the same thing as you in the form of “Recent Clients”.
Comment by Dave Davis — March 9, 2007 @ 5:14 pm
Yeah using links through is fine, as you all know I do it all the time!
Comment by Tom Doyle — March 12, 2007 @ 9:01 am
[...] You might well be asking yourself what is the Red Cardinal crackpot on about now? Well, this is another one of those ‘one thing leads to another‘ posts. [...]
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