A competitor of mine is in the biz of aggregating items for sale from various sources and displaying them in a mashup. He owns many sites, each virtually identical but each dedicated to one particular product type. This isn't a new business strategy, the mashup still works, but here's a new twist.
The competitor added a Google map to all pages (that simply shows north america, it's not interactive) and began embedding random longitude and latitudes into thumbnail images from his re-listings. At the bottom of the page is a link to the .kml version of the page you're on, clicking the link forces a download, it's not configured properly.
The result is that image searches in Google for any product his sites serve return his images extremely highly. More than few medium to longtail searches result in his site displaying 80 of the first 90-100 images, that's EIGHTY! out of 100.
Since he's got the markup wrong the images also all trigger a download event from Google's search results but if he was to get that right he DOMINATES image search, with borrowed thumbnails no less.
Does this mean we should all embrace .kml ? [
code.google.com...]
