SalesForce.com and SEO Names

Comments | Posted by Lee Odden on Oct 23rd, 2006 in Online Marketing, Rant

In a rare moment of vanity-search weakness (yeah right!), I Googled my name (Lee Odden) and was surprised to see an AdWords ad from salesforce.com. I am not sure why they would do that as there are so many other people in search marketing whose names are searched on more frequently, are well known, more prominent in the industry, etc.

Out of curiosity I started plugging names into Google (50+) to see which ones would pull up more ads from salesforce.com and the only other names pulling up salesforce.com ads were Danny Sullivan and John Battelle.

This is very strange indeed as I don’t belong in the same room as those two guys. The even stranger thing was that the landing page is pure crap. There’s nothing on it. Maybe it’s salesforce.com’s call for search marketing help?

Update: Just so you think I’m not seeing things, below are screenshots.

Subscribe to this Feed

Be the first to rate this post: Poor

Loading ...

Tags:salesforce.com, vanity-search

Related Posts You May Enjoy Reading:

Please read the Online Marketing Blog comment policy.

Lee Odden

gigi, that does make sense. Google probably is not going to show the same ads to US based isp's as those in Europe.

Lee Odden

Jeremy, it would very much fall into the category of a compliment!

Thanks for the clarification Mark.

Incidentally, my company finally started using salesforce.com recently and we are very happy customers.

gigi

hi Lee.. thank you for your screenshots. This is strange... I've just googled Danny Sullivan and none of the sponsored links looked the same as the ones in your screenshot. Maybe its because I am using Google UK.

Mark Mangano

Ugh - two typos on URLs!!!

http://www.kieden

and

http://www.salesforcewatch.com/2006/08/salesfor...

Sorry about that.

Mark Mangano

Hi Lee -

I too see the ad. Salesforce is using it to promote their "Salesforce for Google Adwords" application that integrates Google Adwords tracking with Salesforce.com.

The application was created by a company called Kieden (http://www.kiden.com). They were acquired by Salesforce earlier this year; I wrote about it on my Salesforce-related blog: http://www.salesforcewatch.com/2006/08/salesfor....

Also, the landing page IS screwed up. It should take you here: http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_ov...

-- Mark

Jeremy Luebke

So what is your opinion on this? Is it something that upsets you or you think is unethical? It's one of things I'm on the fence about. Even if I was for it I doubt I would actually do it due to lack of ROI.