Comments on: Learning From Ex-Googlers: Shoes of Prey SEO

By: Damien Town

Damien Town — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 04:03:00 +0000

Hi Dan

Great post, any bets on when they will have added a Pinterest page?! Seems crazy given their product is such a perfect match.

By: Dejan SEO

Dejan SEO — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 23:58:00 +0000

Thanks Mike, I think there is much to learn from a pristine website such as yours. Too many SEOs obsess over things like anchor text, seo landing pages and keyword stuffing and just make things unnatural. Shoes of Prey is a great example of how a website can be successful just by focusing on the product and users.

By: David Trenbath

David Trenbath — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 10:55:00 +0000

Hi Dejan,

Great post. I was wondering what other sites you have analysed that are run by ex-Googlers?

Thanks
David

By: Mike Knapp

Mike Knapp — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:53:00 +0000

Hi Rick – I’m Mike Knapp, the author of the site, and the ex-Google software engineer who now work at Shoes of Prey. I need to point out that at my time at Google I didn’t work on search, and I have zero knowledge on the proprietary algorithms that Google uses. (I worked instead on internal apps and Google Reader.) The other co-founder who also worked at Google also didn’t work on search (he was on the business side). We actually haven’t done much (if any) work on SEO. We’ve been too busy building the business! However, I can see that it’s probably something we should look at more in the future. This is a great discussion. Thanks everyone! :-)

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:28:00 +0000

Nothing so special so far, i guess this post is entirely created to gain quick links? isn’t it?

By: Dejan SEO

Dejan SEO — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:03:00 +0000

I noticed that too, but their link was organic I think.

By: Dejan SEO

Dejan SEO — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:02:00 +0000

They should pay you money for that advice. Gold.

By: Alistair Lattimore

Alistair Lattimore — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 12:43:00 +0000

Following on from the comment about the number of pins they’ve received from pinterest, that really highlights another huge opportunity for them.

Firstly when you custom design a shoe, every shoes appears to generate a new URL – even when your custom shoe combination matches an existing shoe. As such, Shoes of Prey are generating duplicate image content needlessly. Just like traditional duplicate content problems, they are now splitting link equity between images that are identical & as such pinterest will show much lower sharing figures for each image.

Secondly they’ve got a huge opportunity to craft automatic alt text for each custom designed shoe as well, instead of “Design your own shoes” as the alt text. Improving that alone could yield solid results from image search but if they cleverly linked those into hub pages of listing similar shoes from other users – they could pull in all sorts of mid-long tail traffic for more precise/descriptive search phrases.

By: Joanne

Joanne — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 10:28:00 +0000

Did I miss the bit where something is mentioned about their non brand keyword rankings? Also this is probably off topic but it mentions that this is one of their best links fashiontribes.typepad.com but take a look at the site, Blatant selling of exact match anchor text (sitewide) links. Thoughts?

By: Dejan SEO

Dejan SEO — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:37:00 +0000

Interesting that their blog has so few social shares. I guess the product is visual so it makes sense to focus more on chit chat and pinterest than reading long posts.