Usability Blog - Consequencing

I was watching the briefing by Gordon Brown earlier. I noticed that on the front of the two lecturns was some writing. I assumed that one said Prime Minister and the other Chancellor. But no, not at all. What they actually said were the identical same words: number10.gov.uk. So I duly typed this into my Firefox address bar. Took a scout around. Noticed the flickr, YouTube and twitter feeds. Thought (very briefly) about whether to add number10 as a friend.

Hey, hold on a minute. If I link to this site, it’s going to help their SEO. The sites going to move up from No. 3 on Google to No. 1. (Interesting that telegraph.co.uk is No. 1 - they are hardly going to be his No. 1 fan - shows that SEO isn’t just about being nice - a search on Yahoo for miserable failure currently returns www.whitehouse.gov/president as the top result - and if you’re reading this after November 2008, the president is currently George W. Bush - The Mighty Bush).

So, the financial crisis has helped with SEO of number10.gov.uk. What interesting and bizarre offline campaigns are you running to raise the profile of your domain name?