One of our blog posts, “21 Celebrities with Their Dresses and Skirts Caught in the Wind“, used to rank well for the term “windy skirt”. However, for some reason we stopped ranking and can not be found among the top 50 search results. When searching google today for “windy skirt”, I got the following search results: It certainly is not easy to rank when Google gives preference to a bunch of crappy videos on Youtube, a website that not surprisingly is owned by Google. Not Easy to Compete when Google Gives Preference to Youtube Videos
One of our blog posts, “21 Celebrities with Their Dresses and Skirts Caught in the Wind“, used to rank well for the term “windy skirt”. However, for some reason we stopped ranking and can not be found among the top 50 search results. When searching google today for “windy skirt”, I got the following search results: It certainly is not easy to rank when Google gives preference to a bunch of crappy videos on Youtube, a website that not surprisingly is owned by Google. How ShareASale Works with Scam Merchants
We recently published a shoe shopping guide on Your Next Shoes with information on how to avoid online stores selling fake footwear. In the blog post, we warned against Chinese retailers such as ShoesPie, Tidebuy, and Tidestore. Similar for them all is that they copy product images from reputable retailers and pretend to sell them on their own websites. When the customer finally gets his or her order (if anything at all), it’s usually too late to complain to the credit card company or Paypal. Today I came across another scam site, namely Dress W+E, usually just referred to asContinue reading » How Tokyo’s Top Luxury Hotels Fail at Social Listening
Last week, I participated in a podcast with Christian Brodin, who runs the blog Maverick CEO. In the podcast, we discuss social media trends and how Your Next Shoes has developed a fan base of over 1.8 million on Facebook. You can listen to the podcast on iTunes. As part of the conversation, I briefly touched upon an issue that I’ve pondered on for a while. While I travel relatively infrequently, I enjoy leaving hotel reviews on TripAdvisor. An early adopter of user-generated content, the website is used by millions of travelers. The valuation of TripAdvisor is higher than thatContinue reading » Why Our Obsession with Facebook Page Post Reach is Actually Correct
Jon Loomer, a highly respected authority on Facebook marketing, published a blog post at the end of last year titled “Why Our Obsession with Facebook Page Post Reach is All Wrong“. While I often find Jon’s insights helpful, I was slightly annoyed by the above article when I first read it. Initially, I let it slide. However, since then, Jon has been republishing the same blog post on his Facebook page on at least a couple of occasions. Basically, he argues that Facebook needs the news feed to be a good user experience, and that they can’t possibly show allContinue reading » How Macy’s Uses Black Hat Methods to Improve SEO Ranking
February 12, 2011, was a nightmarish day for J.C. Penney. In a well-researched article in the New York Times, David Segal exposed how the retailer had been buying links to improve its search engine ranking. Google immediately took manual action, and J.C. Penney quickly disappeared from Google search results. In December of the same year, I contacted David Segal regarding a solicitation that I received from a now-defunct company called Atrinsic that offered me $50 to link “shoes” in a blog post on Your Next Shoes to a specific page at macys.com. While he seemed interested, David Segal decided notContinue reading » Google Video Search Results
I think it’s great that Google is providing more video search results, but isn’t it going a bit overboard? When doing some competitive research today, I discovered that a search for “Ways to Wear the Scarf as a Hair or Head Accessory” provides video links as the first 7 results. Four of them are actually results for the same video, but even when overlooking the duplicate search results, my preference would be if Google would limit the results to 2-3 videos per search. How about having the option to show more videos? For example, they could display 2-3 videos, thenContinue reading » How to Use the Facebook Upload Image Function
We previously wrote a quick guide on how to get the right thumbnail to show when posting a link on Facebook. Unfortunately this method did not always work, so we could not hide our excitement yesterday when we discovered that Facebook has made it possible to upload an image when posting a link on Facebook. To show how helpful a function this can be, let me take this post from Jon Loomer as an example: His post links to a blog post titled “Facebook EdgeRank: Which Post Type is Best“, and the only image included in the article is thisContinue reading » Chinese Spammers With a Sense of Humor
For a long time I have blogged about the Chinese scammers operating on Facebook with the implicit blessing of Mark Zuckerberg’s spam team. While the spam ads are usually removed within a few days or weeks, it seems to be good business as new ads appear on a daily basis. Today these three Facebook advertisements caught my eye: “Baggu” is the Japanese word for “bag”, and “handobaggu” is how a Japanese would typically pronounce the English word “handbag”. Finding good .com domain names isn’t easy, but RunFa Zhou (obviously not his real name) really used his imagination for this scam:Continue reading » Contacting GoDaddy About Incorrect WHOIS Data
This is a follow-up to the blog post I wrote the other day on newbalanceshop-jp.com, which is a scam website advertising on Facebook. I sent an email to GoDaddy about the domain in question having incorrect WHOIS data and that newbalanceshop-jp.com is hosting a counterfeiting website: “Both newbalanceshop-jp.com and 2013shop-jp.com are registered using fake addresses and are participating in illegal counterfeiting and false advertising.” The response I got back from GoDaddy simply stated: “We have neither access to, nor jurisdiction over the content on this site. Any issues regarding the content of the website will need to be addressed eitherContinue reading » Removing the Google+ Button
We have decided to remove the Google+ buttons from all our blogs. While we added them shortly after the launch of Google+, as far as we can see they’ve not contributed positively to our SEO ranking or helped us in other ways. Our most popular blog has over 1.6 million Facebook likes, but only 107 users have bothered to click the Google+ button. While our case may be extreme due to the nature of our audience, Google Plus so far has been a tremendous failure. How about you? Will you be keeping the Google+ button?