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Radiohead King of Limbs Online Execution

Loss of Limb: What Radiohead could have done to improve their self-distributed King of Lambs Album web success.

Over three years ago I beat up Radiohead for the online execution of In Rainbows. I was frustrated because they had a great opportunity to prove the self-distribution model online, but made several simple mistakes that may have reduced their effectiveness. With their latest release, King of Limbs, which hit the web today, they made some similar mistakes.

Before I jump into the King of Limbs website improvement suggestions, I do want to applaud their music and alternative distribution experiments. They are still doing a great job changing the music industry–I just wish they partnered with a company that knew what they were doing online.

King of Limbs Site Improvement Suggestions:

King of Limbs
Radiohead King of Limbs Album Website

Here’s what I wish Radiohead would have done with their King of Limbs Album Website from different standpoints.

King of Limbs Album Cover
King of Limbs Album Cover
Usability:

  • Splash homepage. Relying on Image map for navigation with poor alt text. Glad I’m not blind.
  • But they want me to be blind. There is no description of what is on the album. How many tracks? What songs?
  • No opportunity to preview any of the music. I don’t need to hear the whole song, but I would love to hear a sneak peek before drop $9-48.00.
  • No help deciding what digital version to choose from.
  • Newspaper Album terminology confusing.
  • No links to any information about the band. No links to other sites about the band or other albums.
  • Navigation comes and goes. Homepage has no navigation other then image map. Some pages have Home link, Order Tracking, Help and Checkout. Other have only Home link and some have Home, Order Tracking and Help, but no checkout.
  • Checkout jumps to www.thekingoflimbs.com through strange transaction URL redirect. If you started on kingoflimbs.com, this may trip up some people, especially with higher levels of browser security.
  • Not brought into a secure form until you fill out your email address and password. Order form being non-secure until this step may scare some people.
  • No choice on the download options. Does it always come down as a zip file?
  • The zip file came with no instructions whatsoever. Some people might want help loading the MP3s into iTunes, etc.
  • The zip file included the album cover, but didn’t bother with a song list, lyrics, videos, art, or any information about the album

Social:

  • No images to be used as thumbnails on Facebook or other sharing platforms when linking to the site.
  • No sharing options on the site. Why not encourage people to brag about downloading the album?
  • Completely reliant upon news organizations to point to the URL and share the news. No information about the release.
  • No link or embed of the music video. The press felt it was worth sharing, why did Radiohead skip it?
  • No evidence of interaction with fans on release day – other then a Tweet that says you can download the album.

SEO:

  • A splash homepage with an image map. Seriously?
  • Title tag is: “The King of Limbs : Where are you?” No mention of Radiohead, music, album, etc. “Where are you” not helping anything.
  • The alt tags on the image map are not helping the site (The Americas, S.E.Asia, UK/Ireland, Europe, Rest of the World.
  • No meta description. Guess they don’t care what their listing looks like in the engines.
  • Used only an H2 and a H5. I’m scratching my head on why they chose those two.
  • Had the search engines crawl the correct URL before the album launch. A search for “King of Limbs” has the following URL #1 in Google: thekingoflimbs.com/CC.php?ID=2.
  • Both canonical version of the site resolve (thekingoflimbs.com and www.thekingoflimbs.com). Pick one!
  • KingofLimbs and www.kingoflimbs also resolve – I can’t tell which domain they want to use.
  • All the different domain variations clearly creates duplicate content problems, but each area of the map you click on generates the same content–only the price changes.
  • Most of the URLs seem to push through a php page that uses a javascript URL rewrite.
  • Passing a large amount of link equity to shop.sandbag.uk.com.
  • The various SEO mistakes make it so search spammers, music resellers and bit torrents can potentially outrank Radiohead for their own album. Since they are self-distributing this could result in lost sales or unnecessary commissions.

Maybe it doesn’t matter?
Despite all the issues I raise above (and many more I didn’t bother pointing out), I’m sure the King of Limbs album will be highly successful. This site is still executed better than the In Rainbows site was. Again, I’m frustrated that they didn’t put the web to full use, especially if it is their primary distribution method.

Unnecessary disclaimer: I listened to the album while writing the post and must say that I enjoyed it. So far Codex is my favorite song.

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Google Engage For SEOs

Something caught my attention while in Gmail today. Google had an ad targeting SEOs to get them to use Google Adwords for their clients. Seemed reasonable, but I was a little surprised by what I found.

Here’s the Google Engage Ad I saw:

Google Enage Program for SEOs
Google Enage Program for SEOs

I clicked on the link and ended up on the homepage for Google Engage. Immediately you are greeted with the following message:

Are you a search engine optimization (SEO) professional that helps small businesses with their online presence?
The Google Engage program offers search engine optimization professionals like yourself the training and tools that will help you offer AdWords services to your clients.

Clearly there is no SEO engagement here, but that is fine. They simply want more Adwords clients. Reading further through the page, I was surprised to see the page was written by someone who used English as a 2nd language:

“As a member, you will get the following benefits: Trainings to build and enhance your AdWords skills”
“By enhancing your online skill set and knowledge of Google products, you’ll be more attractive to potential clients and more beneficial to your existing ones.”
“Register today and begin further growing your business with Google!”
“Google Engage has already helped thousands of businesses and individuals around the world establish great business opportunities.”

Do I want to be trained on bidding for English words by an organization that uses “trainings” on the most important page for their program? Reading through the entire page, the choice of words reminds me of some of the poor content creation attempts I see on the web that were written by agencies based in the Philippines who will write articles for $0.05 a piece.

To make matters worse, the only customer quote they could come up with was from WEBSEM based out of Israel. They didn’t even list his name, nor did they link to his site. A search for WEBSEM agency doesn’t work, but WEBSEM Israel gives me a LinkedIn page. The only person close to being a “Founder” attached to the company is Asaf P who lists himself as the Operating manager. His link goes to www.websem.co.il which, according to Google, is completely in Hebrew. Of course, translating it to English produces poor results.

There’s nothing wrong with using a customer quote out of Israel, but I found myself looking at the URL several times to see if I, in fact, am on Google.com because there were very few signals that made me feel like the Google Engage program was legitimate.

But I did find this video:

/End Rant – Okay, I know I’m picking on Google Engage, but I do think they could get better “engagement” if they ran their homepage text through a fluent English-speaking editor & marketer.

Some SEM agencies will be put off by the Google Engage program (Is Google Trying to Steal their customers?). I specialize in only Organic SEO Consulting and a couple of my customers already spend over a million dollars each month on AdWords, so my participation would in the program would primarily be motivated by the $100 credit I could give to some of my smaller customers.

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Google Blue Arrow Navigation Issues

Over on my SEO Naturale consulting site I added a post about the little blue marker you may be seeing on Google SERPs. The little arrow or triangle was added to help with keyboard navigation on Google (which few people will probably use). The problem is that it will likely cause false paid search clicks, poor user experience, and extra weight to the number 1 listing in Google (whether it be paid or organic).

Read the full article to discover: Google Blue Arrow Issues

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Dustin Interviewed About SEO

The Search Engine Journal was kind enough to interview me about various SEO topics, including: evolution of SEO, using UGC to drive SEO, Domainers vs. SEOs, and making the transition from in-house SEO to out-house SEO (working out of my house as an SEO consultant).
Dustin Woodard
I didn’t realize it until now, but this is my 2nd interview with the Search Engine Journal–the first was over 3 years ago. If you dig reading about me 1/10th as much as I do, then I suggest you check out both interviews:

Dustin Woodard 2010 SEJ Interview
by Todd Mintz
Dustin Woodard 2007 SEJ Interview
by Jessica Bowman

Besides learning more about me, I think you’ll find some helpful SEO tips inside both interviews.

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Wondering What t.co is?

Soon many people may be wondering where all these links that have http://t.co/ in them are and if they can be trusted. The short answer is that they are auto-generated by Twitter as it is their new self-built URL shortening service & they can be trusted as much, or as little as other shortening services.

what is t.coBackground on the t.co Domain
You may recognize .co as being the TLD for domains for the country of Columbia. Columbian domains have long had rules that they must be registered by Columbian-citizens only, much to the dismay of domainers, as .co typos are far more common then other accidental domain TLD truncastions like .cm (cameroons) or .ne (Nigeria). I’d expect far more people accidentally type in “Amazon.co” & hit the enter button before the “m” then leave out the “o” in .com (Amazon.cm).

In early 2010, Columbia decided to open it up registration to anyone (doesn’t open to public until 7/20/2010), starting with registered trademark owners and companies that apply to be “.co founders” (companies that are going to do something neat that helps the validity of .co domains). So, Twitter was granted t.co and is using it for its built-in URL shortening service.

Background on Default Twitter URL Shorteners
Due to the 140 character limit in Twitter, users have long used URL shortening services so they can still say something when sharing a long URL. For example, the post your are reading has this URL:
https://www.webconnoisseur.com—all-tables/twitter/wondering-what-t-co-is/
If I tweet about it, I’m already using up 66 characters, meaning I only have 74 left to comment on the topic & if anyone retweets me, they’ll lose another 19 character, including spaces by including: RT@webconnoisseur, leaving them with only 55 characters to work with. Instead, I used bit.ly and only used 20 characters: http://bit.ly/tdotco

Many different URL shortening services sprung up, but Twitter did choose URL shortening services automatically for anyone using long URLs. They started with one of the oldest ones: tinyurl, then eventually defaulted to bit.ly. Both services were provided by other companies. Hence why it makes sense that Twitter finally created their own: t.co. Right now, t.co is live for direct messages (they used twt.tl for a few months), but will be rolled out for all tweets soon.

Another benefit of many URL shortenings services is analytics – they provide data on how many clicks your shortened link got, and in some cases, where they were shared. With t.co, Twitter said it would share analytics to companies using Twitter’s commercial services. It is unclear if they will also open data up to the general public.

t.co SEO Considerations
URLs shared on Twitter have long been no-followed, but the links are often spread throughout the internet outside of Twitter, even in places that follow the links (a blog post inspired by a link shared in Twitter, for example). This means the type of redirect the URL shortening service uses, matters for SEO. If it is a 301 redirect, the link can still pass a vote to the site or page, in the eyes of the search engines. A 302, however, doesn’t benefit the page or site. This is why I’ve long approved of clients using tinyurls or bit.ly, but not twurl (twurl.cc) and, until recently, told people to steer clear of Hootsuite generage links (ow.ly).

The good news is that I’ve tested t.co links and they are using 301 redirects, which means if the t.co link is spread around the internet, you may receive the SEO benefits.

Other Benefits of t.co

  • Malware Detection – Twitter will warn users about potentially dangerous links that use t.co
  • Set character length – t.co links will always be 20 characters
  • Full 140 characters – t.co links won’t count against the 140 characters available
  • Link intelligence – Twitter will learn much more about the links being shared on Twitter and can surface popular links in an algorithmic way

I wrote this post because I fully expect people will be caught by surprise when they start seeing t.co links everywhere – not just on Twitter, but on Facebook, email, texts, etc. If you read this post all the way through, you’re now an expert on the history of the t.co domain.