Scripps (owner of Shopzilla) has taken a beating recently as the company claims click costs are too much for Shopzilla to handle. Scripps has therefore said it would concentrate on brand building and driving free traffic. One strategy seems to be link building. And I mean a TON of link building.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), one factor that goes into rankings on Google and Yahoo! is the number and quality of inbound links. If your site has a lot of links from high quality (traffic, relevance) sites, that’s good. Not a lot of links, not so good.
Well, seems that Scripps has discovered this SEO tactic and has put links to Shopzilla, BizRate, and uSwitch on most of its media properties. Here are some examples:
From Redding.com:
From Newsnet5.com:
So this is what they mean by free traffic.
You can find these links on most of Scripps’ newspaper (20 listed on this page) and broadcast television (10 listed on this page) sites. These links are in addition to the various modules of Shopzilla content that were already in place on most Scripps properties.
Very smart move on the surface. Whether there should be some sort of disclosure that Scripps is the parent company of both the newspaper/tv station + Shopzilla is not really bugging me.
What does make me a little uncomfortable, though, is the lack of relevance and value to the average Joe reading a newspaper site like Boulder’s Daily Camera.
After reading Looking for the warning signs in kids, do parents really need to ‘Comparison Shop for Digital Cameras and Appliances at Shopzilla& BizRate’?
Well, the way the links are displayed (bottom of the page, below the logo, copyright…) suggest they are looking for more inbound links to increase the PageRank of Shopzilla pages, rather than pushing readers to click on those links.
“Scripps has therefore said it would concentrate on brand building and driving free traffic”
That means they are now looking for spontaneous and SEO trafic, rather than SEM ? Sounds like a strange move. I understand they want to increase spontaneous trafic.. But I feel hard to understand their SEO strategy, when we know Google is now focusing more on User Generated Content rather than comparison pages (that can be considered as spam).
Nice find! Keep in mind though that your own definition of inbound links is relevant: “quality”
Parents looking for warning signs in kids don’t really need to ‘Comparison Shop for Digital Cameras and Appliances at Shopzilla& BizRate’ The engines will see it that way too.
Still, something is better than nothing. At the very least, they’ll push spiders to shopzilla and bizrate (though, I’d expect they are getting hit daily already)
I have to admit that this is a pretty weak attempt at SEO. They’re using existing properties that are affiliated and pushing the links to the bottom of irrelevant pages. If you look at algorithm changes that Google has made in the past years, they value relevance and transparency and discount random links placed at the bottom of a page. Google is much too wise for these tricks and if reported will quickly recognize that they are owned by one parent company and automatically discount any interlinking. Dare I challenge Shopzilla to actually build content worth linking to? Or is extreme innovation outside the realm of 1.0 Shopping Engines?