BooneOakley.com is a large advertising agency that has done 2 very revolutionary, and possibly damaging things:
- Created their website as a video
- Redirected their domain name to youtube.com
Instead of the usual marketing Agency Flashturbation heavy websites, Boone Oakley has gone a different direction to present themselves to large corporate clients seeking an online marketing agency who specializes in video production.
It’s bad enough that they lost their content to search engines by only using a video (actually multiple videos) so that no one can find their address, phone number or contact them through a web form. They also redirect users to a different website, a site they do not control or have a lasting connection.
When people start linking to the new website, they will not link to BooneOakley.com, but to youtube.com. This is a huge loss of link juice and will be detrimental to the long term success of their website.
It is cool, new, hip and edgy to have a Youtube website today, but when YT looses favor to the next big thing BO will be in a crunch.
Still, kudos to BO for taking this big risk and providing a truly unique web experience.
7 Responses
We have used this principle on our language teaching website and have had good success with getting more traffic.
Nice post….very useful information…..
Here’s what I would do in your situation:
use a framed website and keep your own site content in a small top frame. the bottom frame would externally link to youtube.
Yeah, that’s mostly because of the nature of the re-direct. We used a php based script that hits before any of the header tags. So the redirect actually sends crawlers to youtube and they index the page as booneoakley.com.
Probably a javascript based redirect would allow the metatags on booneoakley.com/index.html to get picked up normally. However, and this is probably an old stigma, I trust php more than javascript and we wanted to make sure the redirect was relatively bulletproof.
I’m probably just being paranoid there. Thanks again.
Thanks for the comments Bill. I applaud your creativity.
Im sure this approach works well for your specific business. Many firms have no need to be found for keywords in internet search engines and flourish based on the quality of their work, word of mouth, a great client database etc.
My point was to warn firms that doing this will effectively remove your domain name from the search engines: boonoakley.com is not displayed in the search engine results pages.
http://www.google.com/search?q=boone+oakley
Lists are awesome, sorry if that sounded obnoxious.
A. Thanks for the post
B. We’re not a large agency, we just have some large clients who want a small, fast, forward thinking partner.
C. We do have SEO, maybe not in mountains of text, although check this out: http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?user_agent=1&address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.booneoakley.com&action=Parse+URL
Meta tags, lots of readable content on the page, more than any flash driven website, also hundreds and hundreds of inbound links from very searchable blogs.
D. The point of the site isn’t to have a central hub, but instead to be everywhere. Why even leave your blog when the whole story is right here (albiet you can see more if you click through). The only thing we really did to promote the site were a couple of posts on Twitter and Facebook.
E. It’s an ad agency site, and an experiment in creating buzz. If we can’t do it with our own site … where can we do it? Also I’m still up in the air about what SEO brings our particular company. Maybe some of the agencies that are drafting our name can benefit but that’s not how we pull in business.
F. About $10 worth of paper and pencils == killer ROI. 😉
Thanks for your post.