So you may have noticed that Adobe are looking to buy Omniture for $1.8-million. Ridiculously interesting news for creatives! Hugely exciting for web analysts! For SEOs? Not the most mindblowing thing ever to happen…

BUT – that’s not what this post is about. It IS about Adobe though, and more specifically it is a quick case study in missed SEO opportunities (commonly known as ‘FAIL!’).

Drum Roll… for the Biggest SEO Currently Known to Humankind:

1. Go to Google (as far as I’ve tested works the same in any country).
2. Type in ‘click here’ (that’s right, the worst anchor available. With or without quotes, doesn’t matter).
3. Take a look at the beautiful top result:

So… What’s so special about that?

Well, Adobe are top. And take a close look at the details in the screengrab (data is aggregated through Aaron Wall’s SEO For Firefox plugin). Here are the 2 important points to note:

1. This is a Pagerank 10 page. That’s 1 higher than Youtube.com. 2 higher than Amazon.com. Hell, it’s 2 higher than google.co.uk!
2. According to Yahoo the page has well over 100-MILLION inbound links.

Hmm – How’d They Do That?

Easy – they did it by accident. Every site in the world that hosts PDFs sticks a little button on their page to tell their users “hey, if you can’t see this file, download Acrobat Reader!”. Every one of those links passes linkjuice across to the Adobe Reader page, many using the anchor text ‘click here to download acrobat reader’.

In plain English: Adobe have built up one of the most powerful pages on the web, by accident, through a simple badgeware scheme.

But… I still don’t get it… Why is this an Opportunity? Pagerank 10 is great right? They already hit the jackpot!

The reason it sucks is that Adobe have done absolutely, positively Zero with it. As far as I can tell they haven’t even noticed it. Here’s a screengrab of the landing page:

Here are the simple opportunities they missed

• There are no keyword rich outbound links on the page.
• No strategy for pushing linkjuice to important pages elsewhere on the Adobe site.
• The page ranks for ‘click here’ & ‘acrobat reader’, but they’re not using its power to target any tough terms.
• Even aside from extra SEO potential, they haven’t done anything to up-sell you to anything else.
• And finallly… when you do click the ‘download’ link & grab the file, they then just drop you into what’s basically a dead-end page. No ‘sign up for our newsletter’, no ads for their other products, no nothing.

In summary: This page has more link equity than 99.9999% of pages on the web, and it’s simply wasted.

Special Bonus Extra SEO Opportunity!

Surely this is a one-off, right? There couldn’t be another opportunity like this sitting around? Well, return to google again & search for ‘Flash’. Another PR10 landing page sitting on Adobe’s servers. Another page with well over 100-million inbound links. Another page with huge SEO potential left totally unfulfilled.

The sad thing is, a couple of minutes spent on either of these pages could add huge amounts of cash to Adobe’s pocket.

Anyone else?

Is there a bigger untouched opportunity out there? Anything else out there like this?