Scripps' Shopzilla Discovers Link Building

Scripps (SSP) (owner of Shopzilla) has taken a beating recently as the company claims click costs are too much for Shopzilla to handle. Scripps has therefore said it would concentrate on brand building and driving free traffic. One strategy seems to be link building. And I mean a TON of link building.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with search engine optimization [SEO], one factor that goes into rankings on Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO) is the number and quality of inbound links. If your site has a lot of links from high quality (traffic, relevance) sites, that’s good. Not a lot of links, not so good.

Well, seems that Scripps has discovered this SEO tactic and has put links to Shopzilla, BizRate, and uSwitch on most of its media properties. Here are some examples:

From Redding.com:

From Newsnet5.com:

So this is what they mean by free traffic.

You can find these links on most of Scripps’ newspaper (20 listed on this page) and broadcast television (10 listed on this page) sites. These links are in addition to the various modules of Shopzilla content that were already in place on most Scripps properties.

Very smart move on the surface. Whether there should be some sort of disclosure that Scripps is the parent company of both the newspaper/tv station + Shopzilla is not really bugging me.

What does make me a little uncomfortable, though, is the lack of relevance and value to the average Joe reading a newspaper site like Boulder’s Daily Camera.

After reading Looking for the warning signs in kids, do parents really need to ‘Comparison Shop for Digital Cameras and Appliances at Shopzilla& BizRate’?