Have you heard of Everyclick.com? The premise is that it is a search engine that enables you to support your favourite charities, just by using it in place of your regular search engine. I had already heard of it vaguely, but I went and took a proper look today after reading about the PR brief (registration required) given to Edelman and Geronimo. The brief includes:

driving traffic to the site, recruiting new users and establishing the credibility of the brand with charities, business, the education sector and the public.

Naturally, the first thing I did was turn to my normal search engine and search for everyclick. That’s strange. Results from press releases from a search marketing agency, a charity news site, a couple of forums (mainly wondering why they aren’t in the search results) and lots of charities advocating using them.

Now, they appear not to be particularly hot on the difference between a 301 and a 302 redirect and they obviously don’t have an awful lot of unique content (their search results are most of the content and these are provided by Ask). They are also a competitor of Google’s. But surely they would appear higher than 55th (where I’m currently seeing them) for their own name…?

They don’t even rank in the top 100 results for a search for their homepage’s exact title tag: welcome to everyclick.com the search engine that helps charity. Duplicate content problems are killing them here: the top result is www.amnesty.org.uk/goto.asp?BannerID=137 which 302 redirects to a duplicate of the regular everyclick homepage on the everyclick.com domain. Ouch!

I know that Google doesn’t particularly want other search engines ranking willy nilly. But ranking for their own name should be OK - the other search engines rank for theirs: yahoo, live, ask. I don’t therefore think that it would be a manual penalty (although you could claim they are a thin-affiliate site, at least they are a reasonably high quality one and are also doing it for a good cause).

I think the story here is two-fold:

1. why does Google not trust everyclick? (The other search engines mainly do: Live, Yahoo, Ask - even though Ask manage to rank a redirection page instead of the main everyclick page: dx.doi.org/10.1574/everyclick)
2. what could Everyclick do about it?

Everyclick could carry out their marketing in a much more search engine savvy manner

I think the main problem is that they are being penalised by Google at the moment for duplicate content problems. They have gone out with a (no-doubt-expensive) PR campaign and got mentioned on a load of powerful charity domains. The problem from Google’s point of view is that these pages look very much like pre-sell pages - with lightly rehashed press release content - and they tend to link to duplicate content on the everyclick.com site. Because this strategy has worked so well, they have ended up effectively competing with some very powerful charity domains to prove that they are actually the originator of this content - not helped by having 302 redirects from very powerful domains to duplicate content on their own site (see Amnesty International example above).

So here’s a piece of free advice: pages like this should either be kept out of Google’s way with a robots.txt entry or (better) redirected to the home page once the target charity has been noted or (even better but more work) turned into real pages about ‘Everyclick for Amnesty International’ or ‘Everyclick for the Woodland Trust’ with actual content about helping those charities and linking back to the homepage with some good internal anchor text.

I hate to see charities wasting money

I’m sure the PR campaign they are undertaking is bringing them a return - they seem to be getting great coverage at the moment. But I think it could be made an awful lot more effective by improving their search engine friendliness a little…

If nothing else, improving their standing with Google would enable them to spend a lot less on AdWords - they are having to buy their way into all their branded searches at the moment. As the PR campaign increases their visibility, there are only going to be more of these. Wouldn’t it be nice to get them for free?

Disclaimer: We do not currently work with Everyclick, though if anyone there is reading this, and you want to take our advice, we’d love to get some credit…!

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