The other day I was looking at some tracking data for the movers and shakers in the blogosphere over at Blogscope when I came across a rapidly rising subdomain I’d never heard of – blog.indecisionforever.com. Curious as to what this was, and why so many people would be linking to it in their blogs, I started to dig deeper into the data. What I ended up finding was a lesson in link campaigns and how even the big companies can be guilty of link baiting.
First, I found out that the links were all coming from people who had seen a recent episode of the Daily Show with John Stewart where he was interviewing Jim Cramer. They all seem to be coming from people who posted in their blogs and such video clips of the interview itself. Yet the funny part was when I actually went to the blogs these links were supposedly coming from I couldn’t find them! I looked at several of the top blogs (quality blogs too, no link spam or junk blogs) that supposedly had this link and it was the same thing – zilch, nada, nothing!
Determined to find out what was going on I went back to one of the top ranked pages and started going over every line, every ad and every picture until I found it – right below the linked video in dark grey text on a light grey background!
It turned out it was some old-fashioned link campaigning going on, but with a twist. It wasn’t the blog owners doing it – it was the hosted video from Comedy Central! Sneaky move on their part (that actually worked!) to get rankings and views on the search term of “Jim Cramer” through anchor text and links.
Fri, Apr 17, 2009
Link Building