URL was hyundai.com. Anyone looking for “edit your own” couldn’t find it. The only improvement I would recommend to Honda would be to ditch the extra

You’ll notice that the advertised URL isn’t the one that ranks. In this case, the advertised URL redirects correctly with a 301 and both URLs contain the same keywords (Honda and Crosstour), so searchers aren’t likely to get confused. You may remember that I took issue with Hyundai’s use of a redirected vanity URL last year, but that was in part because the advertised URL was edityourown.com and the “real” URL was hyundai.com. Anyone looking for “edit your own” couldn’t find it. The only improvement I would recommend to Honda would be to ditch the extra parameters. crosstour.honda.com currently redirects to http://automobiles.honda.com/accord-crosstour/?from=http://crosstour.honda.com/. Is the from parameter really needed in this case? Diving further into the site, it appears that primary navigation uses a folder URL structure and secondary navigation uses a parameter-based URL structure. This makes it difficult for the bots to know when parameters are required vs. optional. Which leads to URLs such as this being indexed:You’ll notice that the advertised URL isn’t the one that ranks. In this case, the advertised URL redirects correctly with a 301 and both URLs contain the same keywords (Honda and Crosstour), so searchers aren’t likely to get confused. You may remember that I took issue with Hyundai’s use of a redirected vanity URL last year, but that was in part because the advertised URL was edityourown.com and the “real” URL was hyundai.com. Anyone looking for “edit your own” couldn’t find it. The only improvement I would recommend to Honda would be to ditch the extra parameters. crosstour.honda.com currently redirects to http://automobiles.honda.com/accord-crosstour/?from=http://crosstour.honda.com/. Is the from parameter really needed in this case? Diving further into the site, it appears that primary navigation uses a folder URL structure and secondary navigation uses a parameter-based URL structure. This makes it difficult for the bots to know when parameters are required vs. optional. Which leads to URLs such as this being indexed:You’ll notice that the advertised URL isn’t the one that ranks. In this case, the advertised URL redirects correctly with a 301 and both URLs contain the same keywords (Honda and Crosstour), so searchers aren’t likely to get confused. You may remember that I took issue with Hyundai’s use of a redirected vanity URL last year, but that was in part because the advertised URL was edityourown.com and the “real” URL was hyundai.com. Anyone looking for “edit your own” couldn’t find it. The only improvement I would recommend to Honda would be to ditch the extra parameters. crosstour.honda.com currently redirects to http://automobiles.honda.com/accord-crosstour/?from=http://crosstour.honda.com/. Is the from parameter really needed in this case? Diving further into the site, it appears that primary navigation uses a folder URL structure and secondary navigation uses a parameter-based URL structure. This makes it difficult for the bots to know when parameters are required vs. optional. Which leads to URLs such as this being indexed:Using famous people in ads can be great for several reasons, but can be problematic from a search perspective. If the famous person already has a solid set of results, it may be difficult for the brand to rank for that person’s name. And viewers are just as likely to search for the person as for the brand. You can see this scenario with the Focus On The Family commercial, which featured football player Tim Tebow.This year? No microsite. No offline/online integration. No social, viral, online experience. The ads simply showed their domain name: hyundai.com. I’m sad this might mean they think their idea of engaging an audience with offline/online integration was a failure, when really it just could have used a better execution.
They do rank #1 for their brand, although they’re still advertising a domain that redirects elsewhere. But at least both domains have “Hyundai” in themClearly the commercial caused people to search for the Tebow family in much greater numbers than for Focus On The Family. Could Focus On the Family done anything to be found for those [tebow] searches? Well, sure. After all, the Huffington Post article about the commercial ranks number two, so it managed to break through all of the legacy content. But focusonthefamily.com site doesn’t seem to have a full article of content that shows it’s relevant for the query. It does feature a video and image, but very little that search engines can actually do anything with.
This is a cautionary tale of online reputation management as well. Lots of negative articles about the commercial are ranking for these queries and the brand’s positive spin is nowhere to be found.
Doritos – ranking despite themselves
Doritos. Their commercials caused search spikes for their brand, and they do indeed rank. I would call this success despite adversity, since snackstronproductions.com and doritos.com are duplicates, and they seem to love creating microsites for every campaign (crashthesuperbowl.com ranks second for their brand name). According to , the word “Doritos” isn’t even on the page and the text is:
“snack strong productions logo (8K) – no flash page Snack Strong Productions requires Macromedia Flash, version 8 or greater. Please click here to download. “
So go them for managing to show up anyway (likely through links).
Go Daddy – integrating media
You can’t fault Go Daddy. Their commercials get your attention and they drive people right to their web site. Last year, . Do people looking for video that’s “too hot for TV” really then buy domain names? As I found last year, apparently the answer is yes. This year, “We had a tremendous surge in Web traffic, sustained the spike, converted new customers and shot overall sales off the chart.”
Dockers – everyone wants free pants
Looking at Google Trends during and after the game, the dominating search was related to those free Dockers pants. Everyone loves pants. Especially if they’re free.