Background Story:
Ganji.com (赶集网）: one of the biggest classified information sites in China
Baixingwang（百姓网）: one of the biggest competitors for Ganji.com in China.
Ganlvwang（赶驴网）: another websites of Baixing.com
In the end of 2010, Ganji invited Ye Maozhong, the most famous brand marketing planner in China and Yaocheng, one of the most famous actresses in China to make a commercial ad for its website. Rumor says that this ad cost Ganji more than 0.2 billion RMB. In the ad, Yaocheng shows up on a donkey’ back with all kinds of second-hand stuff she’s just bought in the market (Ganji). By the end of the ad, there is a slogan saying that at Ganji.com, you can find everything. The ad is shown in CCTV, the central Chinese Television and in subway. A lot people did see the ad and tried to search for ganji, but many of them could only remember the donkey instead of the name “ganji.com”. Instead they search with “赶驴网” ( Ganlvwang, “riding a donkey”).
Baixing.com is quick to detect the dramatic increase of the search volume for “赶驴网” ( Ganlvwang) and create a site with www.ganlvwang.com as its URL. This site attracts most of the traffic which should have been to Ganji.com. Also through SEO techniques, Baixing successfully use almost all the content of Baixing in the ganlvwang without getting SEO penalty.
Darwin Analysis:
The Ganlvwang Event is another living testimony that the search volume is the prime drive for traffic. This will be one of the highlights in creative search marketing. As we know, the limitation of search rankings gives little space for the large number of players. The idea of Ganlvwang might shade some lights on the relationship between event marketing and the search volume. It also shows us that if we are willing to observe, explore and experiment, the potential is enormous in the industry of search marketing.
Up until now there have emerged some articles on the ganlvwang event, but none of them is punchy enough in my opinion. Here I would like to share my thoughts with my dear readers.
Currently, Ganlvwang is ranked first for “ 赶驴网”. But if we take a closer look at the Baidu index, the index for the word is only 0.7m and the pages with “赶驴网” in title are only 105,000 roughly. Also most of the search results in the 1st page are news and baidu Wikipedia. The former come and go quickly while for the latter, most people searching for Ganlvwang would not click these results. Instead they go to the Ganlvwang straight away. So with the competition not quite high, it is quite possible to be ranked in 1st page. I saw a online forum from Haozhou who ranked in the 1st page several days ago just by putting “赶驴网” in the title. Today it has gone out of the first page and remove “赶驴网” from its title. So the conclusion here is that a good ranking for “赶驴网” is easy but temporary.
I entered ganlvwang and found that all the data come from Baixing through a technique of link consolidaton. Normally, if the content is quite similar or same under two URL, these two sites will be de-valued or even punished by the search engine. However, we can put a # in the URL to solve this problem, because spider will neglect all the content after #. That is to say, spiders only index the content page at www.ganlvwang.com. All the content after # would not be indexed and punished for its duplication of the content from Baixing. This perhaps explains why only 1 page is indexed of Ganlv by Baidu and 50+ pages by Google.
Now lets’ examine how Baixingwang leveraged the ads made by its competitor, Ganji.com. The statistics above tell us that a large number of inbound links link to ganlvwang which must come from the text links in Baixinwang. I think the impact of these links is just temporary, for spiders would not give good scores to links under the same domain. Also search engine spiders see and index little content in Ganlvwang despite the high link juice. So it is quite easy to get higher ranking than Ganlvwang. It’s just a matter of time.
By doing this, ganlvwang diverge a lot of traffic which should have gone to ganjiwang. However, the point is how to keep the traffic. After all the search volume will definitely go down when the TV commercial is off. At this point, Ganlvwang should quick to launch some promotions, activities and so on to keep the traffic. Also, from the SEO perspective, currently Ganlvwang is only different from Baixing wang in URL and all the links from Baixing go to the same landing page in Ganlvwang. Boson suggests Baixingwnag should plan long enough to create more unique content for Ganlvwang, so that the latter could gain more traffic from non-brand keyword.
No matter what, this event has caused quite a sensation and inspired a lot of insightful discussions and thoughts in the Chinese internet world. This article are just my ideas. Any additional thoughts? We would like to hear your voice also.