Danes in need of your help! :)

[Overgaard1982]

Hi to everyone.

I write on behalf of my fellow students at Copenhagen Business School in Denmark. We are a group of four people on our last semester at the BSc in Business, Language and Culture (/Ba.Int - International Bachelor). Our Bachelor's project is one about the SEO-business from the viewpoint of a danish firm, Netpointers

http://www.netpointers-technologies.com/

Our purpose with the project is to resarch on how the company can solidify and develop its position as the leading(/biggest) SEO company on the European market.

We'd like to include some research on how the European market for SEO-solutions will develop in the nearest future (ie. the next 5-7 years). This research is to be composed by (hopefully) a number of articles on the subject, interview with a number of customers and hopefully some interviews with leading experts on the subject.

And this is where you guys enter the picture . With all that expert-knowledge in here, we were wondering if you could give us some advise on the subject? Are there any articles that are a must-read for this topic (topic = the development on the European SEO-market for the next 5-7 years)? Are there any experts/writers that you may think could give some clarity to this question? And do you think that an interview per phone (or e-mail, but preferably phone ) is possible?

Best regards

Morten Overgaard
Copenhagen, Denmark

(with fellow students Thor Larsen, Louise Thygesen and Louise Jensen)

P.S: The reason for why I wrote the subject in this forum is that there (with all due respect) doesn't seem to be that much action going on in the other forums . So please moderators, do not remove it (please..)

[Marcia]

Hi Morten, and welcome to SEW Forums!

Gee, that company has apparently been around since 1998 - so I would assume they already have some visibility and reputation in the local market and in the industry if they've been involved and have been actively doing marketing.

Generally, with an established company it would be important to investigate and assess their current position and goals to date before making direction changes as you're proposing, so the logical step would be to investigate a company's past and current position and SEO practices - and the search engines are an excellent place to start.

First, what is their usual method of marketing? Is most of their business legitimate work-of-mouth referrals? Are they involved and networked with other reputable or notable people and/or companies in the business? In other words, what's their current visibility?

And also - very important one way or another, to define a company's methodologies and targets - how do their optimization methods match up with the Webmaster Quality Guidelines at Google:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

For example, as one reference point, looking at their site using linkdomain: at Yahoo Search

http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=ut...chnologies.com

This page shows up in the results as linking to them, though I can't seem to find the link (there are a number like that for some reason)

http://www.rnacosmetics.com/cosmeticsurgerywesternaustralia/

We can then see what's on the homepage of that site,

http://www.rnacosmetics.com/cosmeticsurgerywesternaustralia/

which strikes me as being a bit odd as one that would be linking to an SEO company. The we can see that on that link page, there was a link to this site

http://cell-phone-number.gype.info/

I find it strange that this particular cellphone site AND an seo firm would be linked to from that same page on the macosmetics site. I also saw some other similar anomolies which for economy of space I'll leave out of this post at this time.

We can see, on their New Zealand site's homepage that they're saying that they have over 1,000 clients worldwide.

Welcome to Netpointers Technologies
Netpointers europe's biggest and most professional search engine optimisation (seo) supplier. Has more than six years' experience exclusively based effective optimisation. 1000 clients throughout the world - Netpointers offers you online sales .. www.netpointers.co.nz - 24k - Cached - More from this site - Save

(It actually redirects to a subdirectory on their main domain.)

Sounds like a lot - so what does your project anticipate accomplishing, seeing that they're so widespread with so many clients? And BTW, out of all the companies around, how did you happen to choose this particular company for your project?

[Marcia]

Oh my folks, read this article here:

Radisson SAS Busted for Black Hat SEO - Again

Radisson SAS Getting Banned in Google for the First Time
Radisson SAS used the Danish “SEO” company Netpointers to do the SEO work for them – the very same company that do SEO for Porsche and BMW. And as David Naylor pointed out, both BMW and Porsche just recently got banned for doorway pages with redirects.

Not surprisingly, Netpointers use the same techniques on their own site: tons of duplicate doorway pages: site:netpointers-technologies.com “search engine optimization”

Anyway, on November 4th 2004, SAS Radisson got banned from Google for over two months. After removing tons of Doorway pages and low-tech JavaScript redirects, they got back into the index again on January 7th 2005.

And from the other blog post referenced:

Porsche SPAMing Google

Netpointers is the name of the company that did SEO for BMW. They’re from denmark, hence the np_dk. It is the very same company that did SEO for SAS Radisson and got them banned for 2 months in 2004.

Just a couple of points of interest found while surfing around.

[Overgaard1982]

Hi Marcia, and thanks for the reply

You have some interesting points there, but we're actually on the right track (or so we think) in regards to our approach to the project - we're going to do an internal and external analysis of respectively the company and market and then use the TOWS matrix to discuss future strategies. So our main concern is not how our approach to the project should be.

Our main concern is to find some articles or experts that could say something about the future development of the SEO industry and market in Europe in the next 5-7 years. Do you guys have any ideas who might be obvious to get an interview with for this?

Best regards
Morten Overgaard

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

I'd just like to comment a few things on the project ...

• There is no Europe
  There is a huge difference from one European country to another when it comes to this industry. You can off course calculate an average on the numbers but that number will just not be very accurate for any induvidual country.
  
  
• 5-7 years is not the "near future"
  With Internet, in general, and search and SEO specificially 5-7 years is the very far future. Any estimates on what the SEO business is going to look like in that long time will be 100% pure guesswork.
  
  
• Why would competitors help?
  As I understand it you are doing this study with Netpointers that claim to be operating on the same market where you want experts to talk to you. Such experts will most likely be competitors to Netpointers. I think it will be hard to convince them to give free business consulting to a competitor ...
  

[ssjothun]

Davs Morten!

I actually wrote that article about Radisson SAS on SEO Bomb, as well helped writing the article that got Radisson SAS banned the first time.

I can probably hook you up with Gunnar Braathen who's the CEO at e-guiden.no (one of the most prominent Norwegian eZines on ecommerce and marketing), and I'm sure he has a thing or two to say about companies like Netpointers....

ps: Jeg har tidligere arbeidet for et av norges mest fremtredende firma innen SEO, saa jeg kan muligens hjelpe dere ettersom jeg for tiden arbeider i Canada og ikke har noen konkurrenter i europa...

[Overgaard1982]

>>>MIKKEL DEMIB SVENDSEN

Hi Mikkel, and thanks for the reply - you've got mail

>>>SSJOTHUN

Thanks for your reply. I've checked your website and you seem to know your stuff . Gunnar Braathen also sounds interesting. I will consult with my group and get back to you within a week .

Best regards
Morten Overgaard

[FreeForm]

Hi Everyone, I'm downunder in New Zealand and have been doing some resarch into Netpointers. As mentioned by others in this tread Netpointers have very little detail about themselves, who their clients are and how global they really are.

Any info would be of interest, please send to gmadd@globalnet.co.uk with Netpointers in the Subject line.

I have dug around in the Company registers data bases where they are operating and they are only listed in Denmark and NZ from what I can tell...which must mean that they have re-sellers, etc in other countries.

Also doing a whois domain search tells an interesting story as someone has mentioned they all point back to the same site. Can't tell if they own the China ones?

Thanks everyone and good luck with the project.

G

[FreeForm]

I can only read English...sorry guys