Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant
November 30, 2005
Mmmm, Thorntons. Watch this space. Thorntons, the UK chocolate retailer, is running a marketing campaign based around the web address mmm.thorntons.co.uk, suggesting that 'mmm' is what you say when eating their chocolates. It stirred up conversations within the uknetmarketing community because they forgot to switch the mmm subdomain on before the campaign went live. Well, the penny dropped and sub-domain is now working, but is fulling resolving at this address, so the site is currently in danger of being duplicated in Google. They also are being pilloried for not having http://thorntons.co.uk/ working at all, so I expect this will be turned on too, shortly, and the site will be in danger of being triplicated.
As a test case I am interested to see when this duplication or triplication of data - assuming it is not corrected in the meantime - starts to have a detrimental affect on the Thorntons ranking for relevance. One way to test this is to see if it affects their ranking for a generic 'chocolates' search globally: http://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=chocolates , where they are currently in second position. This could take a little while to come out in the wash, so I'll keep and eye on it over the next couple of weeks and report back.
posted by Steve Wednesday, November 30, 2005
November 16, 2005
Google Base is rather odd, if you ask me. Phillip Lensson has had a detailed look at it over at Google Blogscoped. I'll try and be more meaningful in my assessment, in due course.
posted by Steve Wednesday, November 16, 2005
November 14, 2005
Google Analytics arrives and it's FREE!!! Google's purchase of Urchin earlier this year had me thinking this would be an obvious fit with Adwords, to enable more comprehensive conversion tracking. The surprise is that Google are letting us all use it for free. I have installed it on Johnston.co.uk and will report back my impressions. The upper limited on a free implementation is 5 million page impressions per month, which is pretty big by any standards, and if you exceed that, all you need is an Adwords account (with no minimum spend) and your page impressions are unlimited. Too good to be true? We'll see...
posted by Steve Monday, November 14, 2005
