These images are maps of the online link networks between the 20 top ranking sites in Google for the search query "act on co2" on June 16th 2007. The heavy cluster of .gov sites in the middle shows large nos of UK government websites dominating the search engine results. This dense cluster of nodes shows the effectivness of linking between sites on established domains which are trusted, have great link equity and are regularly updated with unique content.
I want to analyse these further at some point, looking at who's "occupying the Act On CO2 space" on the major social networking sites including Digg, YouTube, delicious and many more...
I've just come across some great analysis of SERPs on Tony Ruscoe's blog (UK Goverment assumes everyone uses Google) where he demonstrates that he's sharper than the governments online team.
Back in March he saw the TV spot and searched online to discover that it was only Google that had been search optimised with regard to the 'Act On CO2' campaign! Whilst a little premature (my suspicion being that the govt. site was just being indexed far quicker by Google's spiders) the post is well worth a glance as he covers all major engines and raises alot of the concerns I have over this curious shift towards search from the government.
I've summarised Tony's SERP analysis below:
So let’s take a look at the results returned by the four most popular search engines...
When it comes to online advertising, the UK government is certainly trying. I learned some more about the 'Act On CO2' campaign today courtesy of 2 great blog posts. The first on The Coffee House revealed that David Milliband (UK Environment Secretary) has a blog that links to an Act On CO2 MySpace site, more on that in a minute. Second was GoodGreenPR which provided useful insight into the role of PR as an agent of change with regards to global warming and related issues.Thanks to Caroline Wilson for republishing the article from Behind the Spin online.
The Act On CO2 campaign is the first stage of the Climate Change Communication Initiative, a £6m investment aimed (according to Caroline Wilson's article) at "communicating about sustainability over the next three years". Online social communication is very much part of this. The MySpace page myspace.com/actonco2 attempts to engage in a largely youth-dominated but increasingly commercial online network, which makes me wonder why the campaign's personified as "Male...37 years old" on the profile.
There are links on the page to various government departments (there are obviously some SEO link strategists at work in the government) including the 'Act On CO2' site itself. Most interesting to me are the links to 'social site Flickr & YouTube.
The YouTube channel has attracted 3 subscribers and 162 channel views but only 2 videos have been watched. Little surprise given the content - I don't think many people are interested in watching a collection of videos, the first 4 of which feature interviews with/speeches from David Milliband. 3 subscribers, 4 friends and one comment are hardly impressive usage statistics, but hey, maybe a little link equity from my blog will help them!
There is one comment that reads:
" death to the new world order!subscribe my channel and add me as a friend!:)"
...TUGS10197's profile page is similarly anti-establishment with clips from the Hollywood film V for Vendetta and other videos about gang violence and the KKK.
The areas of engagement here are clever but the content woeful and the lack of understanding that these spaces cannot be easily controlled or spun to desired ends is obvious.
The Flickr profile flickr.com/photos/actonco2 is similarly dull and far from useful but please watch the slideshow here if you want to see more pictures of Mr Milliband and others standing at a podium speaking at the Citizen's Summit on Climate Change.
There is at least some interactivity, such as the option to embed this little banner on your own site...
I really don't see how any of this will ever help to reduce CO2 emissions, perhaps a Facebook 'Act On CO2' branded carbon calculator application would work better, or a video forum where people can discuss how they effectively cut their emissions would work better.
Following on from my last post I decided to look a bit more closely at the paid search element of the 'Act On CO2' campaign.
Using the Google AdWords external traffic estimator tool it's quickly apparent that any surge in search activity for the term "act on co2" has either not happened or has not been picked up by Google's systems yet. To target the UK with an unlimited budget for the term (even on broad match), the system cannot find sufficient data to provide any forecast. Opening the targeting up to 'All Countries & Territories' does not alter the results.
TrafficEstimate.com, the reliability of which I cannot vouch for (I've no idea where they get their data) suggests the DFT site's received 132,200 visits in the last thirty days, the graphic suggesting this is actually fewer than in February! (though the gaps in March & April make me very reluctant to draw any sort of conclusions from this data).
Back to the PPC though...There are 2 versions of copy running on AdWords:
Motorists are being asked to Help WITH Smarter Driving techniques
Car buying and smarter driving tips to reduce your CO2 emissions
They appear to be displayed in even rotation. There's been an increase of bidding activity on the term "act on co2" in the last week - with 4 other ads being displayed. Interestingly one is for another government website and to my recollection has been showing since the campaign went live. It's about Government Grants and links to a page detailing eligibility for FREE gas/oil fired heating installations...
Also bidding are commercial sites www.ibuyeco.co.uk (selling 100% carbon neutral car insurance!), www.letsautomate.com (home automation products) & www.greencarsite.co.uk (as it sounds - selling 'green' cars). ibuyeco has even made it into the premium (yellow-highlighted) spot at times, indicating that it's receiving a high CTR and is considered highly relevant to the search term, doubtless pushing up the cost-per-click for the DfT.
Continuing on from the last post looking briefly at Google and Yahoo! SERPs for the search query "act on co2" I decided to poke around a little more and see what's been written recently.
Google shows 10 pages indexed that link to the Act On CO2 page, half of which are non-government sites. Yahoo! Site Explorer shows over 264 sites linking there including WhatCar and the GreenCarCongress. Google Blog search even indexed my last post within an hour of it being posted!
James Cooke has an interesting article on his blog where he considers in a post called 'Using Google Trends to track DoT 'Act On CO2' Campaign' that the DFT have made "a bad choice". He, like myself, wonders if the "implications of not publishing a URL, but a search term instead" leaves the civil servants open to link bombing.
His suggestion to track search volume on Google Trends is an interesting one though in my experience there's unlikely to ever be high enough search volume for this tool to be useful, perhaps Hitwise data will materialise though...
