Kylie Minogue launches non-SEO compliant social network

Ok, so I'm drawing visitors at Kylie Minogue's expense but it's certainly meant well. Particularly, if you think about the world class search engine optimization recommendations I'm about to share with her designers and developers.

Yes, you guessed right, I'm going to use Kylie Minogue's social network (KylieKonnect.com) which by the way is a vanity URL--oh how I loath vanity URLs. Anyway, I thought it would be an interesting little workshop, dissecting some basic SEO stuff that the developers forgot about.

 

Why is this topic important to Bitshelf? I see quite a few businesses and entertainers launching social networks with little consideration to social media optimization and SEO? What do you think is one of the reasons why MySpace is so popular? Go to google, type in an artist's name. For example, dare I say, Madonna low and behold her MySpace listing is #5!

 

What happens when I search for kylie ? Nada, zilch, nil...you get the idea.

 

No, I'm not recommending Kylie go ahead and create a MySpace profile page although that wouldn't be a bad idea. She could benefit from a MySpace profile and gain additional real estate on the engines. I am going to help her open up her walled garden so that more of her fans can find her via search engines! So, I'm going to keep my recommendations simple and hopefully they will be agreeable by all.

 

• Header response: The first thing to look at are header responses from the server that Kylie's social network is hosted on. The reason for this is that you want to determine, externally, whether there are barriers in front of search engines to collect the information they need.
• Redirects: As stated above, the vanity URL is http://www.kyliekonnect.com/ which redirects to http://ourtribe.mobi/default.aspx?uid=1&pid=4. Could the destination URL get anymore non-descript than that? Furthermore, based on a header analysis (see screenshot), they are using a 302 redirect a major no-no from an SEO (read: Link to Bitshelf 302 Hijacking piece). Remove this immediately.
• Search friendly URLs: For those who do not know, an unfriendly URL tends to have parameters, etc. in the email, similar to http://ourtribe.mobi/default.aspx?uid=1&pid=4&sid=7255&m=Site& (that's my profile page!). Why is this an issue? Well for one if you review Google's webmaster policies, their crawlers prefer not to have to extrapolate content from parametized URLs such as the one mentioned. What Kylie's developers should employ is an effective URL rewriting strategy so that the parameters look more like http://www.ourtribe.mobi/ and my profile page could be http://www.ourtribe.mobi/cezanne/.
• Frames: Yes, it's the 21st century and a web 2.0 property is sporting frames. Why are frames so bad, well putting aside poor usability, etc., frames can portray an otherwise robust site as a single page. Now, what the developers should do immediately is remove the frames and ensure that it's SEO compliant. Not to mention the fact that it's not section 508 compliant <http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=content&ID=12#Web>.
• Unique title tags: Title tags are html codes that assign titles of the page you are viewing within a browser at the very top in the blue bar. After inspecting a few articles, such as the ringtones update and sneak preview pages, I found that all titles are pretty much the same. For example, although I'm viewing the sneak preview page, the title just says Kylie Konnect, when it could say Sneak Preview "The Kylie Show" - Kylie Konnect.
• Random observations: Oh so I type in http://www.ourtribe.mobi/ and what do I get? Yes, an error.

Update on Monday, January 14, 2008 at 10:11AM by Cezanne Huq

I thought I'd share some traffic statistics from my very favorite, Compete.com:

 

So the site KylieKonnect.com couldn't exceed the 8k mark in terms of unique visitors. You'll notice that there was a spike back in November of 2007, this spike is no doubt due to the small media coverage Kylie Minogue's social network received. After that, the traffic just doesn't hold and since the network isn't optimized for natural search it's unable to gain any momemtum. Kylie, have your  Interactive agency call me before it's too late!