commanderW - 4:45 am on Oct 14, 2010 (gmt 0)

I did some research on the example term Louboutin. Very enlightening!

First result is the official website. Second is a discount site registered in china.

First thing I notice is that the official site is all flash.
the discount site has lots of real text.

Next thing I notice is that the discount site has a blog associated with it.
Now here's the great part. The topics of this blog have 2 main threads -

One thread is about news items with the word christian in them ( because the real designers name is christian louboutin!) How about that?!

The second blog thread has posts that are all in very broken english (babelfish?), offering advice on how to tell fakes from the real thing. I know that one of the tricks of the infamous Bangkok gem scam is to teach the customer how to tell a fake gem from a real one, then sell them a fake one. Is this the same gag?

Results 6-10 are similar. lots of real text and most have blogs too.

Given the statement posted above by Tedster

Last year at PubCon I heard about some kind of coalition between search engines and the authentic manufacturers (and their distributors).

I suspect that the official sites number one position is an artifact of the Google/Industry coalition. Only results 3-5 are legitimate looking retailers. after that it's scammy looking discounters and then a list of DMCA deletions.

And so I believe it is possible that in terms of SEO, the scammers have the legitimates beat. Plain and simple. Real text (but fake merchandise), where the official company has real merchandise ( but fake text).

Then there's that blog thing. I learned something from this. Stories on Christians. Quite a neat way to draw in traffic and direct them to the other links for blog posts on Christian Louboutin boots ;-)

Maybe the lesson is that corporations need to give up on all the fancy flash and get some coders in there.