10e20 Blog

Video has become a bigger part of Netscape’s site as they continue to find their way. Video has its own Netscape Channel and was really made popular when the Michael Richards’ racist rant video was put up. Up until this past weekend the “Kramer video” was the most popular clip on the site (it was subsequently replaced by the Saddam Hussein cellphone camera execution) with over 72,000 views to date.

With each uploaded video Netscape gives you the option to share it by grabbing some simple JavaScript code and then placing it on your site or blog:

Much like this brand new website The Stoners Bar did:

On the actual Netscape page containing the video (right underneath the video), there is a small section called Top Syndicators of this Video. In this box there are up to ten links (all without a nofollow on them). If we look at this specific example - we’ll see a nice text link back to stonersbar.com:

A quick backlink check for stonersbar.com shows us of the four links showing from Yahoo - three of them are from this Netscape story:

There are three links showing due to the fact that this was such a commented on story that it spanned many different pages on Netscape (resulting in extra links). As a result this very new website (domain wasn’t even registered until late October) with basically no content is also indexed by Google due to that nice link love from a trusted, old domain like Netscape:

Now I’m not really that big of a Netscape fan at this point but you have to see the benefits here. They got to add video to their website that their visitors might be interested in, they got a link on a page that has been viewed over 72,000 times (and the associated traffic that comes from people clicking through their site) and they also get picked up and crawled very quickly. So while most people are embedding a YouTube clip into their site - grab the Netscape alternative, push some traffic to it (so that you are a top syndicator) and actually get something in return for it.

One thing that you might think of while seeing my example is: Yeah, that’s fine for a site named The Stoner Bar to have a video of Michael Richards’ spewing racist rants but what about my company?Take a look through the Video section on Netscape and I am sure you will be able to find something that would interest your audience. An electronics dealer? Put this video of someone playing Nintendo’s Donkey Kong on a PS3. A health related blog? This video of a Charlie Brown’s Christmas performed by the cast of Scrubs. Web development company? How about How to connect to an FTP server natively on Mac OS X.