Express & Mirror SEO fight for "SEM"
Dixon Jones ?
CEO. Board member. NED advisor. Startup veteran in the digital SAAS space. BA(Hons.). MBA. FRSA.
This is an interesting SEO phenomenon. Major national papers are fighting over a 24 hour SEO opportunitty every day to attract visitors from Google's daily doodle - the little image that is used to replace the main Google logo whenever they have something interesting to say about a day in history. Today's example was "SEM"... no... not that... instead it is the "Studio for Electronic Music. Now why a Westy German radio station is being used in a UK Google Doodle is not the point of this story. The point is organic results 2 and 3...
As I look at this at around 10:00 AM, UK time, we see the the Express and the Mirror have both got recent articles. It sems that their SEOs jave an intern each, starting the day with a post about the daily Doodle. I can also tell you that the Sun is also on the first page, along with a bunch of sites (mainly from India) that are less well known to me.
I have overlayed the results with a tool that FastFwd have in beta (If you want to try it, look for Sherpa for Majestic in the Google Chrome store, or track down Rishi) which shows how Google is ranking these pages, without links, very quickly. In this case, the pages are outranking Google's own Doodle page.
However - there is absolutely no substitute for authority. The Wikipedia page for the Studio for Electronic Music stands loud and proud. Links still win the day!
The papers must know just how many people click on the Doodle of the day. This goes to a predictable keyword query, which the major news sites can react to rapidly enough to get enough traction to at least pay an Intern's costs. Presumably the ads on the landing pages cover the costs and contribute to the bottom line for these papers.
I find this fascinating. It shows just how much of a micro-level even large companies play when trying to work out ROI. It is not all about the market share... sometimes it is about the micro-share. Is that a new term? Did I just coin a new term?
CEO. Board member. NED advisor. Startup veteran in the digital SAAS space. BA(Hons.). MBA. FRSA.
7 年Two hours later, and Wikipedia is knocked off the top spot... by the Independent! (with the Mirror also jumping over Wikipedia). Screenshot below. These still do not have external links into the pages, but the INTERNAL pages will now be getting reinbdexed by Google and the link equity from those pages may be increasing the importance of the newspaper results. I fully expect, after a week of these shennanigans to have Wikipedia return as the evergreen authority, in the number 1 spot. In themeantime, this is SEO ROI in action.