Avenue A / Razorfish Announces Search Technology to Efficiently Crawl and Diagnose Web Site Performance

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Avenue A | Razorfish (NASDAQ:AQNT), one of the largest interactive services firms in the world, today announced Super-intelligent Link Crawler™ (SiLC), a proprietary tool that crawls within web sites to detect errors such as broken links and “404 Error Messages” that alert users the web page isn’t loading. The tool analyzes why errors occur and can benchmark a web site’s performance against other competing sites. The agency has combined the tool with its search engine optimization (SEO) and web design expertise to improve search rankings and usability for major brands like U.S. News & World Report.

“Avenue A | Razorfish’s SiLC technology was able to quickly and efficiently identify elements of our site that were impeding us from maximizing our search engine visibility”

U.S. News & World Report (www.usnews.com) recently redesigned its web site to grow traffic within its education, health, money and news sections and to improve its search capability within the site. After running SiLC, Avenue A | Razorfish discovered search engines were not ranking many of its web pages because they were viewing pages as duplicate content. For instance, U.S. News & World Report created the main content of a health page article, as well as a ‘printer friendly’ version. The web crawlers were tracking both and consequently not ranking the pages in search engine results. Within two months of the U.S. News & World Report relaunch, organic visits increased by 24 percent compared to the same period in 2006. In addition, organic visits from Google increased by 45 percent compared to 2006.

“Avenue A | Razorfish’s SiLC technology was able to quickly and efficiently identify elements of our site that were impeding us from maximizing our search engine visibility,” said Jennifer Simonds, Director of Online Marketing from U.S. News & World Report. “Previously it was a manual process that would have taken us months to complete. Instead, we were able to see significant increases in search engine performance in less than three months. By following their recommendations around social tagging and optimizing our news feed, traffic substantially increased from these channels by more than 500 percent.”

Commented William Flaiz, vice president, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Web Analytics for Avenue A | Razorfish, ”SiLC is like a Swiss Army Knife that serves many purposes beyond web crawling. It is different than other web crawlers because it can intelligently process why certain web pages aren’t performing well and integrate with other SEO tools to improve efficiencies not only within a web site, but to other linked Web sites, portals and blogs.”

SiLC joins the growing list of SEO tools from Avenue A | Razorfish, including SEOsource™, the agency’s proprietary SEO technology that provides SEO Engineers with full diagnostics to efficiently measure and determine how well a web site is performing and SEOdirect™, a proprietary feed management technology that optimizes and manages search results within major travel, entertainment, news and real estate web sites. All three SEO tools are available immediately to all Avenue A | Razorfish customers globally. Prices vary based on customization and level of analysis.

About Avenue A | Razorfish

Avenue A | Razorfish is one of the largest interactive marketing and technology services agencies in the world. The company helps industry leaders such as Kraft, The New York Times and Starwood Hotels use digital channels to acquire and service customers. Avenue A | Razorfish's full suite of digital offerings includes online advertising, Web site design and development, email and search engine marketing, emerging media strategies, and enterprise portal development. Its award-winning client teams have a great understanding of customer needs and provide solutions through distinct business disciplines, which include: analytics, strategy, technology, media, creative design and user experience. An operating unit of Seattle-based aQuantive, Inc. (NASDAQ:AQNT), Avenue A | Razorfish has offices in markets across the United States, and global operations in Australia, China, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. Please visit www.avenuea-razorfish.com for more information.

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