Emperors Club VIP Website Disabled

I know what you’re thinking – how is he going to tie these unrelated concepts together? Well, just as it took the IRS to uncover a connection between Elliot Spitzer and the Emperors Club VIP escort service, it also takes a true SEO obsessive to tie these two headline grabbers to local search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

Here’s what we know:

1. Soon-to-be-former Gov. Spitzer most likely found the Emperors Club VIP website via a search engine

Escort Services for Governors (not the sort of thing a Gov relies on word-of-mouth referrals for).

2. Therefore maybe we can assume that the site ranked well for some targeted terms.

3. Given all of the publicity, this URL, www.emperorsclubvip.com, now has inbound links up the yin-yang (and they should know about yin-yangs).

4. The owners of ECVIP are likely facing a very expensive legal battle and would be wise to sell any non-core assets.

5. If I were an escort service serving a different cities (it looks like ECVIP’s were London, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Vancouver, Europe & Tokyo), I would be willing to pay a fair amount for the URL and build a well-SEO’d site that targets local escort services for these cities. I imagine that you could relaunch the site with a bit of publicity and it would rank well for a lot of high value terms.

6. The site is hosted by Homestead, a subsidiary of Intuit, which hosts small business websites. If I were them I would take back ownership of the site citing a terms of service violation and provide links to my other escort service clients for a fee (but don’t forget to put a “nofollow” tag on those links right? ;))

7. And now here is probably the most important lesson we can learn from this incident. If your website goes down turn off your PPC campaign!

Emperors VIP Club PPC Ads

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9 Response Comments

  • Stever  March 13, 2008 at 3:12 pm

    Turn off your PPC ads.

    Oh man, I had a good laugh over that.

    Nice work on taking a big current news item and turning it into local search link bait 😉

  • robert  March 13, 2008 at 3:50 pm

    Genius….Evil Genius that is….

  • Stu  March 13, 2008 at 5:44 pm

    Bravo!

    As a side note, this page is getting some great SEO. You’re showing up on page 2 for the popular search spitzer’s yin-yang.

  • Chris  March 14, 2008 at 7:00 am

    Ouch $16,000 for a weekend date! I’d think an ad with that text is going to get 99% “I gotta see this” click traffic than “Gotta buy this” click traffic.

  • Perry  March 15, 2008 at 9:17 am

    Hmm, I did notice those search page examples are dated December, 2007 long before all of the Spitzer news.

    Care to explain THAT?

  • Andrew Shotland  March 15, 2008 at 9:56 am

    Perry,

    Me thinks the crack you smoketh is powerful indeed. Whatchoo talkin’ bout?

  • Geld Lenen  March 17, 2008 at 12:25 pm

    I once forgot to turn of a PPC campaign when my hosting broke down. Goodbye $500,00 in two days 🙁

  • Aziz  October 3, 2010 at 9:15 pm

    Oh man, I had a good laugh over that.

  • kyle leicht  November 30, 2012 at 12:34 pm

    Hilarious!!!!