Using quote pages to get (sort of) contextual links

Look ma, Hookers

Look ma, Hookers

I was being all geeky and looking up some movie quotes to send to a friend, one’s that would help him sort out his messed up life (Hey Danny *waves*). And thought of a little idea which might be helpful in trying to score some links back to your site.

You can get moderately contextual links from pages which list quotes from favourite shows, lyrics or movies.

Let me explain. Lets say you run a small cell phone wallpapers/ringtones website and you are struggling to get people to link to you without paying through the nose for advertising. You could negotiate for a while to try and get the price down, or you could contact the many millions of sites out there which have a page on the movie ‘Phone booth’. Crap movie, but somewhat related to ‘telephones’ no? Now, the site owners probably have site wide ad’s on their quote site but are probably not to bothered about the actual content of their quote pages.

You could just hit them a quick email asking for a link to your site in the quote that you like, e.g

The Caller: Think about it. Why would a guy with a cell phone call a women everyday from a phone booth.
Pamela McFadden: He said it was quiet.
The Caller: Pam, that’s just stupid.

So then you could ask the site owner, if (s)he could link to you with the anchor text of “Cell phone“. Now even though the movie quotes site isn’t about phones, there is a lot of contextual references to phone/phones in that one page.

Since the site owner doesn’t have to write unique content or mess about trying to slip your link into the page, then your more than likely going to be able to get this link quite cheap. Unfortunately most quote pages are low page ranks such as 1 but can certainly aid a new site in a niche market.

So next time your thinking of where to buy links from, make a list of all the shows, movies, songs that you think are in anyway related to your search terms and hunt around quote pages, you’ll be surprised what you find 🙂

Matt Cutts really is whiter than white :)

I have just come across a story which tells us of a feature that YouTube implemented after it was ‘joked’ about on the popular webcomic XKCD.

XKCD originally ‘joked’ about YouTube commenter’s realising they are morons after having the comments they type read back to them before they posts. It seems Google have noticed this and implemented it into YouTube as a sort of homage to the popular comic.

http://xkcd.com/481/

A snippet of the comic from http://xkcd.com/481/

Ok, so you probably knew/have seen that already? Maybe your a speed Digger though and didn’t realise that the Digg submission actually linked to Matt Cutt’s blog post about the subject, a nice bit of link juice passing through to your site right? Well the man at the head of spam… (team) decided to take his blog down and just leave a link to the original XKCD post.

It’s such a nice thing to do… whilst linkbaiters and viral marketers dream of getting links from the front page of Digg, Matt Cutts does the exact opposite and just stops short of 301’n his entire blog to the original story (we wouldn’t want to pass any authority now would we 🙂 ). He is probably the only person on this earth who would do such a thing.

I just thought it was a rare sight to see someone not take the juice, then again this is the emperor of spam fighting, and just goes to show that he seriously does practise what he preaches… or perhaps he just couldn’t handle the traffic? I’d like to think it is the first 🙂

Turns out he couldn’t handle the traffic, dammit.

Yahoo gearing up to launch Google Analytics rival?

Earlier this year (the 9th of April to be exact) Yahoo issued a press release which explained that they had acquired the web analytics and tracking company IndexTools. Now 6 months later it seems that they might be looking to roll out that acquisition to the general public with Yahoo Web Analytics.

Whilst the Yahoo Web Analytics site is still plastered with ‘Coming Soon’ under almost every category it does show some promise to be a genuine rival to Google’s own analytics reporting. According to Yahoo…

From the acquisition of IndexTools, Yahoo! Web Analytics is born!

Yahoo! Web Analytics is an enterprise site analytics tool that provides real-time insight into visitor behavior on your website. With powerful and flexible tools and dashboards, Yahoo! Web Analytics helps online marketers and website designers enhance the visitor experience, increase sales and reduce marketing costs.

Obviously there is ton’s of other marketing spiel on the website but the part that caught my eye in particular is the ability to make custom designed reports to drill down on information that you want to specifically monitor. I have used GA for many a presentation to many a graph hungry CEO, but i have always found that it can lack in some areas such as complete custom reports, hopefully Yahoo can fill this void.

At the moment there isn’t a great deal to go on because only previous IndexTool’s users can access the system, but could we be seeing a serious rival to Google Analytics? I guess time will tell (probably 2009 to be honest), and when it becomes open to the general public then i’ll do a full review.

Google curbs drunken emailing

I just read about the new Google mail labs ‘invention’ that aims to stop you sending emails that you will later regret, more than likely under the influence of our good friend alcohol.

The cleverly named ‘mail goggles’ becomes active at certain times during the weekend, of course you can set the times that you wish this to be active. Lets say your an alcoholic and you’ve just polished off that first bottle of Vodka on the way to work, you might want the mail Goggles to stop you sending that rant to your ex girlfriend after she left you for your brother last week. *I want my cd’s back by the way*

So as you can see from the image above, you have to answer a set of maths questions within a certain time limit or Gmail wont let you send it. I guess that they are also hoping that you’re too intoxicated to make your way to the settings page and disable the whole thing if you do get it wrong.

Anyway, its a nice little fun idea, lets get this developed for drunken text message’s and phone calls and we are onto a winner.