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Marion's cookbook – a SEO-reflection

The case of “Marions Kochbuch” is for a time now – depending on the operators' juridical activities, a more or less present – subject of blogs and additionally we have journals like the c't reporting. In short this is about how Folkert Knieper, the website operator, is rigorously enforcing his copyrights for rather simple pictures he took of miscellaneous groceries and recipes through cease-and-desist orders. I do not want to get into the content of this affair seeing that enough work has been done by numerous blogs, the c’t but also the ARD show Plusminus with the title “Internet rip-off, expensive information-traps”. According to the topic of this blog I want to shine light upon the SEO-component of “Marion's cookbook” which is often called the “factor of success”.

It seems that the domain marions-kochbuch.de is enjoying a rather high rating with Google. This is partially due to the fact that so called sitelinks are being shown for designated queries. The other part is due to the percental share of the ranking on the first page of results being above average – while sites like Wikipedia are still stronger there, the value for Marions Kochbuch is already very good. This strength is surely, for one, thanks to a wide and balanced backlink-structure. The page was apparently able to gather a few voluntary links in the past few years. Admittedly there are a few links that are not especially “clean” and are suggesting that they were traded or potentially bought (here or here) albeit the majority of links look natural. The page itself is using a very intensive and seemingly effective internal linking between the recipes and ingredients. Titles are set up clean and individually and thanks to the use of what appear to be static HTML-pages, they are avoiding a multitude of possible dynamic CMS problems.

Besides the classical text-index there should be a large number of Knieper's attorneys' “customers” who found there way to Marions Kochbuch through Google's image-search. This is another case where known recommendations for ranking optimization were consequently integrated: the filename contains the search term, the pictures have the “common” size, alt- and title-tags are being used in a meaningful way and the searchterms also exist in the HTML-sourcecode in close proximity to the integrated picture. As a consequence, Marions Kochbuch can be found in one of the first spots for the picture-search for most ingredients and recipes.

Can we speak of a perfect use of searchengine optimization possibilities like the c't did? I do not think so – Knieper has admittedly done mostly clean and solid work from a SEO point-of-view but he is mainly profiting from the weakness of his competitors in this area as well as the age of his site and the incoming links to the same. I am a little alarmed that with an increasing echo in blogs and newspapers the number of links will grow, too – it might be worth a though to explain the use of the nofollow-tag ...