Case Study TapeTV

“5 German Startups hit hard by Google“
Video Not Found: Tape.TV Tries to Buy Top
Search Positions
Sitewide Widget Links and Expensive Integrations Don’t Pay Off
It’s a tough market for a video site. Search for any song or video and the first results are almost
always from YouTube. How is a startup supposed to compete with that? By paying for top position,
apparently. Tape.tv’s CEO tried to get top
positioning by throwing money at API
integrations, paid links, link networks, and
more. They saw fast gains, but they quickly
fizzled into nothing.
Guntram Bechtold uses the CEO’s own words
to guide his detailed exploration into why
tape.tv lost so much search visibility. This is
the fourth case study in the “5 German
Startups hit hard by Google” series by
Guntram Bechtold to achieve Certified LRT
Xpert status.
We look forward to your feedback and always
appreciate you sharing the work of our
Certified LRT Professionals.
- Enjoy & Learn!
Christoph C. Cemper
A Case Study by Certified LRT Xpert, Guntram Bechtold
May 9, 2014

Table of Contents
Sitewide Widget Links and Expensive Integrations Don’t Pay Off ........................................................ 0
Case Study Setup .................................................................................................................................. 2
1. Search Visibility Analysis .............................................................................................................................. 2
2.Backlink Profile Analysis ............................................................................................................................... 2
3. Regular Detox for all Backlinks .................................................................................................................. 2
Search Visibility .................................................................................................................................... 3
Link Audit ............................................................................................................................................. 14
Was anchor text overdone? ............................................................................................................................... 15
Did the websites have more CEMPER Power than CEMPER Trust? .................................................. 19
Did the site have too many sitewide links? .................................................................................................. 23
Did they have paid links? .................................................................................................................................... 29
Are sneaky redirects involved? ........................................................................................................................ 33
Is unnatural link growth involved? ................................................................................................................. 33
Are link networks involved? .............................................................................................................................. 35
Trigami .................................................................................................................................................................. 35
Press Portals ........................................................................................................................................................ 37
Agof.de ................................................................................................................................................................... 38
Is there unnatural country distribution? ...................................................................................................... 43
Is there an unnatural deep link ratio? ........................................................................................................... 45
Is there an unnatural link status ratio? ......................................................................................................... 46
Did the websites have a high Link DTOX Risk? .......................................................................................... 54
Competitive Detox Analysis ............................................................................................................................... 60
My Answers to the Interview Questions: ..................................................................................................... 65
Results Analysis ...................................................................................................................................................... 65
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................................ 66
Author Bio: ............................................................................................................................................................... 68
Page 1

Case Study Setup
1. Search Visibility Analysis
Analysis of the analytical drops
2.Backlink Profile Analysis
1. Anchor Text Analysis
2. Power & Trust Balance Analysis
3. Sitewide Links Analysis
4. Paid Links Analysis
5. Power*Trust Ratio Analysis
6. Redirect Analysis
7. Link Growth Analysis
8. Link Network Analysis
9. Country Ratio Analysis
10. Deep Link Ratio Analysis
11. Link Status Ratio Analysis
12. Link Detox Risk Analysis
13. Competitive Link Detox Risk Analysis against competition
3. Regular Detox for all Backlinks
Review of Backlinks
Page 2

Search Visibility
Looking at the recent charts, we see Google has hit tape.tv hard. Founded in July of 2008,
tape.tv is a Berlin-based Internet music TV station. Its viewers can watch current programs and
specific music clips. According to information on their site, the station currently has around
45,000 music videos and 3.9 million unique users a month, with an average visit duration of 25
minutes. Tape.tv has a business model that is driven by marketing collaborations and new
forms of video advertising called "Entertainment Advertising." Managing directors are Conrad
Fritzsch and Stephanie Renner.
Looking at the Sistrix visibility chart we see a strong drop in search visibility from 22.321 to
16.66 SI points within a couple of days. From the middle of February to early April, the domain
only lost around 6 SI points.
Before starting the analysis, I did some research. Here is a useful article on online marketing,
SEO and plans from 2010 (Google Translated Version) http://goo.gl/BlW96r.
Keep these quotes in mind:
Strategic cooperation partners, which include for example Bild.de, Bravo
and stern.de include, ensure further growth jumps.
Lars Dittrich, 2010
During the coming months Fritsch wants to enhance tape.tv especially in
terms of SEO.
Lars Dittrich, 2010
Questions arising from that interview are:
1. What and how does a CEO consider that SEO works?
2. What was done to perform growth jumps?
Page 3

Page 4

One of the very first observations in the video portal segment was that Google is constantly
pushing its own products. That is most likely why, for most Money keyword phrases, YouTube
results top the SERPs. See for yourself.
Page 5

Page 6

Page 7

Page 8

Page 9

Page 10

Page 11

Page 12

Page 13

Link Audit
Top 10 keywords
1. gimme more
2. pork and beans
3. back street boys i want it that way
4. walking on air
5. oasis dont look back in anger
6. round round
7. sillyboy
8. the climb
9. deamons
Top competitors in the niche of tape.tv
1. youtube.de
2. myvideo.de
3. clipfish.de
4. lastfm.de
5. laut.de
6. dailymotion.com
7. eventim.de
8. golyr.de
9. lyricsfreak.com
Page 14

Was anchor text overdone?
Yes and no.
They did not use the typical Money keyword-stuffed anchor texts we know from stores, yet
they employed many typical phrases that are Money keywords for their segment. A typical
keyword set includes “Hakkuna Mattata, Xavier Naidoo, Nirvana, Video killed the Radio Star”.
However, from more than 1,200 anchor texts, there are no overused anchor texts. The most
frequently used anchor text is “Whitney Houston tv” that was used 0.5% times.
Looking deeper into the anchor texts of tape.tv we see that many, many anchor texts are used a
few times but they are hard Money keywords.
Page 15

.
http://arenaa.linkarena.com/tags/xavier%20naidoo%20bei%20tape.tv
Page 16

Page 17

Page 18

Did the websites have more CEMPER Power than CEMPER Trust?
No, CEMPER Power and CEMPER Trust are equal. In this specific segment, very high Trust is
common as we see in the table below. Sites like laut.de, a German music portal, and
dailymotion.com have more Trust than Power.
When breaking down the specific Power and Trust graphs per link source, we see a strange
pattern: many links are coming from specific sources that have similar Power and Trust.
The high number of Power*Trust 4 and 5 links is coming from many sitewide links from
various partners. See the next analysis question.
Page 19

Power hit its peak at 2 and 3 because many partner-sites had power of 2 and 3.
Looking at Trust, this effect is even more visible. Many sites have a Trust of 2, giving a
heterogeneous mix of link power.
Page 20

Page 21

The result of CEMPER Power*Trust verifies this observation by showing that tape.tv is
standing out of the market segment. Too many similar pages are sending way too many links
from their footer and sidebars.
Page 22

Did the site have too many sitewide links?
Yes, their partnerships generated many sitewide links, and they had section-wide links. In the
case of bild.de, the links do not span the whole domain, but they are in a full news section of the
bild.de boulevard and stars section. That’s still a lot of links. Some examples include:
MeinRap.de
It is linking from every single post to tape.tv using a sidebar widget. That totals 58,590 links.
http://meinrap.de/2014/03/20/sentence-karl-lagerfeld-audio/
Page 23

Page 24

Stereopol.de
The blog of stereopol.de is sending 4,500 sitewide widget links from its sidebar.
http://stereopol.de/?p=8728
Page 25

MeineStadt.de
It is part of one of Germany’s biggest online agglomerates. It sends thousands of links using this
sidebar widget.
http://veranstaltungen.meinestadt.de/muenchen/musicals-shows/variete
Page 26

Wihel.de
It is sending thousands of sidebar links. Yes, this generates a network. We’re going to see Vice
again soon.
http://www.wihel.de/kategorien/da-hammer-wieder-was-gelernt/page/10
Page 27

Zoomlab.de
Sidebar links were pretty common. Zoomlab.de sends a couple thousand links.
http://www.zoomlab.de/tag/notizbuch/
Page 28

Did they have paid links?
Yes. You want examples?
Taz.de sold links in their blogs. Why are they sold? Honestly, it is unlikely that a user would add
links to the subscription-termination-letter he sends to the editorial team of a newspaper. See
for yourself:
http://blogs.taz.de/hausblog/2012/07/16/aus-und-vorbei-warum-ich-mein-taz-abo-kundige/
Bild.de sold some links in their People Section.
Page 29

http://www.bild.de/unterhaltung/musik/heino/rockerkrieg-wegen-rammstein-und-denaerzten-28233530.bild.html
Page 30

Page 31

Did wihel.de, the guys that send tape.tv thousands of sidebar links, also have paid posts on
their site? Yes, they have links that originate from wihel.de and go to tape.tv that are
categorized in a section called “sponsored posts.”
Page 32

Are sneaky redirects involved?
No, there were no serious redirects. There was some cheap profile marketing, but that’s not the
biggest problem spotted.
Is unnatural link growth involved?
No, there is a falling or neutral trend in Linkbuilding. Compared to Dailymotion and Eventim
there was less activity visible.
Page 33

When first running the CLV Report we included “DailyMotion.com”. The First result appeared
to be valid, yet when looking into the details, dailymotion diluted the whole comparison, since
they pick up many more links than a german-only site like tape.tv order my video.de. This gets
visible by the fact that only dailymotion is visible in this report and no other site got significant
visibility.
This fact required us to rerun the report again. The result was significantly more readable and
gave relevant insight: When looking at Competitive Link Velocity Report, we see that
myvideo.de and lastfm.de are, relative to Tape.tv, picking up more links. It appears that they
are offering more ways to share and integrate their content into the web in useful ways.
Page 34

Are link networks involved?
Trigami
Yes, there were several link networks involved with tape.tv. Some were intended to do
marketing, others less so.
ID Network Name Network
Network Type Status
Structure
1 Trigami: Social
PR
Agency to
Bloggers
Obvious Stopped in
2011
2 Press Portals Syndication PR Sender Ongoing
System
3 AGOF internal PR By Chance Link Widget Ongoing
4 Vice and Indy-
Media
Cooperations Informal Ongoing
Page 35

Yes, several link networks were involved. One was the trigami network. Trigami used to be an
online marketing platform that allows paying for marketing services like guest blogging.
http://www.eisy.eu/short-trigami-reviews-von-google-blockiert/
http://bit.ly/QtOX1k
Page 36

Press Portals
Yes, they released News on cheap press portals
http://www.internetmarketing.or.at/kostenlose-presseportale/
The network is not hard to reveal, just click on “Presseportale”.
Page 37

Google has in Mid 2013 clearly defined that optimized anchor text from press releases are a
violation of their terms & conditions. This was even clearly echo’ed and explained by Search
Engine land a couple days later.
Agof.de
Yes, one of the most interesting network-producing pages is the German Internet tracking
organization, the German Internet Statistics Authority (AGOF). Using their PR messages and
marketing widgets, they produced a network for their top members. One example is the
homepage widget that connects all members with a direct link. The AGOF is linking to top
players from their website.
Page 38

Page 39

http://agof.de/studienteilnehmer-internet/
Page 40

Page 41

The Vice and Indy Media Network
Tape.tv, populis and others are mentioned regularly by webmasters as media partners. That’s
great from a branding perspective, yet it also produces a link network: many webmasters are
sending thousands of footer or sidebar widgets to all the same players. Here is a typical
example.
http://blog.atomlabor.de/2012/09/supercut-die-noes-in-star-wars-1-video.html
Page 42

Is there unnatural country distribution?
No, the country was normal since many blogs are hosted on wordpress.com, tumblr.com and
blogspot.com. The IP distribution was normal as well.
Page 43

Page 44

Is there an unnatural deep link ratio?
No. Though it looks like a high deep link ratio, it appears to be pretty normal.
Page 45

Is there an unnatural link status ratio?
Yes, the sites have many broken links.
URL schemes of iframe videos were changed and are broken. The user gets to a nice and cuddly
penguin animation, yet the real content is missing. This technical flaw is a real issue since many
high quality pages are linking to these URLs.
Many links have also been recently removed.
Page 46

Page 47

One of the most painful findings was that integration with bild.de.
Germany’s bild.de online newspaper is one of the hottest pieces of online real estate on the
web. Working with bild.de requires either awesome personal connections or a ton of money.
I’m not sure which one tape.tv had, but they had a great integration with bild.de. For a whole
section, their videos were automatically pulled from an api, allowing them to send practically
anything into the bild.de website using an iframe. That’s the good side of the story.
The bad side is that the integration still exists, but it’s broken. At least the image link is still
there.
Page 48

http://www.bild.de/dsds/2012/dsds/mensch-dieter-bohlen-hast-du-einen-schweren-job-
27302118.bild.html
Some of the URLs that are linking include:
Page 49

Page 50

Page 51

http://www.charts.de/song.asp?artist=Avicii&title=Wake%20Me%20Up!&country=de
Page 52

Page 53

Did the websites have a high Link DTOX Risk?
Page 54

Page 55

Page 56

When clicking some links, I found real malware on these domains.
Page 57

Bintr.de – Das Presseportal Das Trading Portal
Bad link neighborhood “Bintra.de,” used to be a binary trade portal – one of the lowest quality
SEO sites. You can imagine how these links look.
Page 58

Firewall alerts
Several links are also generating firewall alerts.
Page 59

Competitive Detox Analysis
In the Detox Check, we see that all their competitors have a very similar detox value of around
220. There isn’t a big spread here.
Page 60

When looking more into details, we see that tape.tv uses more Money keywords the other sites.
Page 61

This most likely correlates with the increased amount of suspicious links.
Page 62

Two rules stand out: Susp31 and Susp20.
Susp31 means that the anchor text placement looks suspicious.
Susp20 means that a high risk score has been detected for this link. There is a high likelihood
that this domain is toxic.
See all detox rules here: http://www.linkdetox.com/faq/.
Page 63

These rules produce increased numbers of moderate and deadly links.
Page 64

My Answers to the Interview Questions:
1. What does a CEO think SEO means, and how does that person consider what SEO
works?
In this case we saw what SEO means: throwing money at media to get integrations and links.
And it works if, with partnerships, a webmaster gets exclusive, valuable and permanently
available website integrations.
2. What was done to perform growth jumps?
There was very well done partner management. Bloggers were invited to cooperate. It was a
nice user experience and result. Yet, this did not deliver long-term high growth.
The integrations gave high growth, but that lasted only for a short time. In the end, it was a
quick-win and quick-loss strategy.
Results Analysis
ID Task Result
1. Anchor Text Analysis Yes, overdone
2. Power & Trust Balance Analysis No, okay
3. Sitewide Links Analysis Yes, too many SW links
4. Paid Links Analysis Yes, paid links
5. Power*Trust Ratio Analysis Yes
6. Redirect Analysis No, okay
7. Link Growth Analysis No, okay
8. Link Network Analysis Yes, link networks
9. Country Ratio Analysis No, okay
10. Deep Link Ratio Analysis No, okay
11. Link Status Ratio Analysis No, this was standard
12. Link Detox Risk Analysis Yes, high risk
13. Competitive Link Detox Risk Analysis against competition No, CDTOX is normal
Page 65

Conclusion
Tape.tv had many, many Money keyword anchors for their site. They rarely re-used the same
anchor, yet a significant amount of all links were Money-driven.
The second issue was that they employed cheap press portals and that they had expensive
press coverage or paid links in expensive environments.
They had widget embeds, yet several of them were broken. That’s not a good trust signal. It was
also a negative seeing malware sites and refactored binary trading sites in the networks.
These conclusions are validated in the CDTOX where the high number of Money keywords and
the strange position of links on the page are sending warning signals.
Page 66

This case study was written by Guntram Bechtold, StarsMedia IT Management KG, and
proud user of Link Research Tools and Link Detox.
A word from Christoph C. Cemper
This analysis is part of a series conducted and written by our new
Certified LRT Xpert, Guntram Bechtold.
Guntram demonstrated his expertise in doing a deep dive on why
tape.tv rose and fell in SERPs. It’s one of five studies he’s doing for
his Xpert certification.
He did a great job investigating the possible causes and isolating the
penalized tactics in his case study. Therefore, I’m very happy to
certify Guntram Bechtold as the latest Certified LRT Xpert by
approving and publishing his research on our site.
Our goal is to provide our user community and clients with quality service and knowledge. Our
Certified LRT Professionals and Xperts are key to achieving this goal.
I look forward to Guntram’s future work, and I personally recommend working with him whenever
you get the opportunity.
Page 67

Author Bio:
Guntram Bechtold
Associate at StarsMedia IT Management (StarsMedia.com)
Guntram founded StarsMedia.com in 2011, a SaaS and Project-Management Company. He
gained a lot of experience as the Project Manager for Yumpu.com, i-Magazine’s self-service
publishing platform with readers from 180 countries worldwide. StarsMedia specializes in
Online Marketing Consulting for established online players and Startups. Guntram is a certified
Scrum Master, LRT Certified Professional and graduate Industrial Designer, living in Dornbirn,
Austria.
Google+: https://plus.google.com/114563253174342074125?rel=author
Twitter: http://twitter.com/guntrambechtold
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Bechtold.Guntram
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guntrambechtold
Page 68