Amazon Turning Ten

If Amazon.com is ten years old, that brings up a bit of search engine marketing trivia. It must meant that linking campaigns, once thought to be the quintessential form of Internet PR, are now more than ten years old! Eric Ward famously helped Amazon get linked all over the web, which was a big part of its early success. Linking campaigns got a further boost when Google rose to the forefront. "PR" in this sense meant PageRank, and it allegedly got a boost if you went out and got the right kinds of links to your site. All of that is still important in online marketing, but as with any tactic, it's been overdone and faked to the point where it begins to lose effectiveness. You need a real pro (like, ahem, Eric Ward) if you expect to get it right. Speaking of Amazon, did I mention you can linking campaigns Andrew Goodman is Principal of Traffick.com, an acclaimed "guide to portals" which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.