Making sure Pizza Hut is "accurately and effectively represented online"

Hello Mr. Pescovitz,
My name is Alli Berry and I am working with Pizza Hut, making sure that they are accurately and effectively represented online.
I noticed that your article “Pizza Hut Perfume” at http://boingboing.net/2012/12/06/pizza-hut-perfume.html discusses the exclusive Pizza Hut perfume but does not contain a link to the Pizza Hut website. Therefore, I wanted to reach out to you in hopes that you will consider linking to it for the convenience of your readers.
The Pizza Hut home page can be found here: http://www.pizzahut.com
I hope this is helpful and you will consider updating your page accordingly. If you have any questions or need any further information, please feel free to contact me at the information below.
Thank you,
Alli
Alli Berry
Performics
On behalf of Pizza Hut
_____________________________
Site Summary:
http://www.pizzahut.com
Pizza Hut delivers more pizza, pasta and wings than any other restaurant. As the world’s largest pizza franchise and a subsidiary of Yum! Brands Inc., Pizza Hut operates nearly 10,000 restaurants in more than 90 countries.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer
The information in this email and any attachments may contain proprietary and confidential information that is intended for the addressee(s) only. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution, retention or use of the contents of this information is prohibited. When addressed to our clients or vendors, any information contained in this e-mail or any attachments is subject to the terms and conditions in any governing contract. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately contact the sender and delete the e-mail.

Done.

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

MORE: nofollow • seo

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

Brainspore

THANK YOU. I spent almost three hours yesterday trying to figure out where to find the Pizza Hut website.
huskerdont

I pity the Internet user who can’t find Pizza Hut’s website on his or her own.
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  They want link juice.
  - foobar
    
    So that’s what soaks into the bottom of the box.
    - invictus
      
      Ew.
    - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
      
      Nah that’s just the garlic aerosol; I don’t know why they bother with it, it has no SEO ROI.
      - nosehat
        
        ”SEO ROI” sounds like it could be an exotic perfume fragrance too!
      - http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
        
        I can hear it being whispered already!
      - gregarious
        
        ”garlic aerosol” would be a great band name
    - DisGuest
      
      That’s how they make the perfume.
- sdmikev
  
  right!
- Navin_Johnson
  
  I must be doing it wrong, all I’m getting is pictures of “Pizza the Hutt”. The postmortem photos after he ate himself to death are gross!
Paul Coleman

Putt Putt to the Pizza Hut.
Bart

Oh no! You duplicated the email when her footer says it is prohibited! The Internet Police are going to backtrace you.

I always wonder under what authority they presume to be prohibiting the behavior of other people via unsolicited email.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Jules-McWyrm/1662074906 Jules McWyrm
  
  Nope – it’s only prohibited if you’re not the intended recipient. It’s alright for David Pescovitz to duplicate it, but don’t *you* go and duplicate that email.
  - Bart
    
    If I duplicate it for whatever reason, under what actual authority do they have to prevent me from doing so? Is there a law that says I cannot reproduce that email or is it as toothless as many cease and desist orders?
    - http://newnumber6.livejournal.com Peter
      
      I believe copyright technically might apply, solely to the case of copying the text of the e-mail directly, but nothing prohibits discussing what was in it.
      
      But of course, we all know how everybody completely respects and obeys copyright at all times so obviously nobody’s going to do it.
      - invictus
        
        Not-so-hypothetically speaking, the respect of an entity’s copyright is directly proportional to the size of said entity’s stable of lawyers and willingness to use them.
        
        Not-so-hypothetically because a friend of mine was actually threatened with copyright infringement charges if he dared publicize a nasty email someone sent him.
      - EH
        
        We don’t know that the footer wasn’t actually added by Mr. Pescovitz, therefore making us the intended recipients. Prove me wrong.
  - JonS
    
    But … isn’t Bart and everyone else here an intended recipient now, via Pesco?
  - PhosPhorious
    
    But. . . but. . . I did duplicate it. . . in my browser’s cache.
    
    Am I a criminal now? My first crime. . . and it’s totally lame. FML.
    - Boundegar
      
      Nooooooo! Their deadly team of Pizza Ninjas is probably on its way even as we speak. Type.
  - Ean Moody
    
    But aren’t I now the intended recipient, since David put it on his blog (on which I am registered member).
- lesmanalim
  
  As the intended recipient, David can presumably do what he likes with it.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Have you seen Cory’s e-mail EULA? I had to get a bigger computer just to hold his e-mails.
Grey Devil

Gee, i had no idea how to find pizza hut. Can someone post a step-by-step FAQ on how to access their site please? ]: im so lost. Do i use Google? Do i send in something via snail mail? Pony Express?
- relawson
  
  No, just go to http://www.google.com and search for the boingboing pizzahut perfume story. the link is there ;)
- for_SCIENCE
  
  An easy way is to summon Dough’nz-cruzt, daemon prince of pizza, from the Planes of Torment and Heartburn. Simply burn the grease of six virgin sausages upon finest corrugated cardboard whilst chanting the Litany of Sauce. If successful, a rusting 1996 Cavalier will appear from a towering pillar of ash and smoke. His physical messenger will aid you from there, but be sure not to look on his visage lest your mortal soul drain from your body like so much melted cheese.
  - http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=13001904 Jeremy Sweeney
    
    Many were roasted alive in the belly of a Slorg that day.
    - social_maladroit
      
      That could happen, if you don’t pay back your debt to Jabba the Pizza Hutt.
- dragonfrog
  
  I’m pretty sure ehow has a tutorial.
- tinydancer
  
  If you are the older women I work with, you will type “google” into the browser window’s integrated search box, clink on the link to Google in the search results, and then type in “pizza hut website”. It physically hurts me to watch this.
nixiebunny

These guys should get some tips from the person who wrote this tutorial…
http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Straight_Line/
- invictus
  
  It’s mildly funny as a spoof, but it’s atrocious as a tutorial. Not because it overexplains a simple concept, but because it does so very poorly.
  
  It’s mildly condescending, assumes no background knowledge one moment and skips steps the next, and mentions advanced concepts but doesn’t bother to provide even a link to a more detailed explanation of these.
  
  Tutorial humour: The last thing you’d expect to evoke the ire of technical writers.
- Ipo
  
  That is so funny!
  Your link was useful to me. I have always missed the line tool in Gimp because I cannot be bothered to read any tutorials.
  Thank you.
http://billmcgonigle.com bill_mcgonigle

Say what you want, but somebody got to bill Pizza Hut for this effort.
- vonbobo
  
  This only lessens the credibility and virtue.
- foobar
  
  What, you’re just giving it away now? Communist.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Say, aren’t Pizza Hut pizzas topped with a frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex?
  
  I can play SEO, too.
  - social_maladroit
    
    Too bad “goatse.cx” is no longer what it used to be.
    
    Curiously enough, Wikipedia reports that, when the “goatse.cx” domain was available again after being shut down, the company trying to sell it was named “SEOBidding”.
lesmanalim

Of course, it has nothing to do with people being able to find pizzahut.com, and everything to do with getting link juice from an extremely popular website (link juice being highly preferable to whatever it is that runs off the top of a Pizza Hut pizza).
- David Pescovitz
  
  Yes, and that is why I made the link “nofollow.” (Although I understand that it’s questionable how well that works these days.)
  - teapot
    
    You bastard, Pesco! How dare you ride the wave of Pizza Hut marketing genius without giving them a link!
    
    Here you go nice Pizza Hut man, thanks for helping to fix the internet:
    http://www.pizzahut.com
saint_al

Yeah, I might be in the market for an empty former Pizza Hut building; there’s one just a few miles away. Wonder if they have a trademark on the roof design and color.
- http://twitter.com/cjporkchop cjporkchop
  
  If they left the building that way, they can’t ask you to change the building.
  
  They might have a problem with you incorporating that distinctive roof shape and color into your marketing, though.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    I delivered pizza for Pizza Hut for several years between 1988 and 1994, and the company always referred to the sit-down restaurants as Red-Roofs, as opposed to the Delivery/Carryout-only locations (which were often repurposed Winchell’s Donut shops in Southern California; one could always tell by the rounded-triangle sign out front).
    
    I worked at a Carryout location, but down the block was a Red-Roof. it got sold several years back, and is now an independent Italian restaurant. They kept the distinctive roof shape, but painted it light brown, presumably so people wouldn’t mistake it for the Pizza Hut that occupied the building for several decades previously.
    
    So I wouldn’t worry about rebuilding the roof, but repainting it might be in order.
- http://twitter.com/pdxbridgefest pdx bridge festival
  
  if Pizza Hut has a trademark on that roof design, a million Hmong households in Southern China, northern Vietnam, Thailand, etc. are infringing it mightily.
merreborn

Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to observe the “SEO Expert” in its natural habitat. The activity seen here is referred to as “Link Building”. This ritual is performed hundreds of times — as a sort of rain dance — in the hopes that the Great Search God will bring Search Traffic to The Site.
http://profile.yahoo.com/4B3LUVD4DDWHB5ZAPOFW65NS4Y Everblunted

I’m sure it’s for SEO purposes.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=20922385 Mike Lewis
  
  Yup: Performics.com
  - David Pescovitz
    
    As I mentioned above, that is why I made it a “nofollow” link.
    - EH
      
      You have to love all these self-styled explainers and their linking skills.
chgoliz

Despite having never visited the Pizza Hut website before, I find that I can type in “pizzahu” at which point Chrome helpfully fills in the T and the dot com for me.

Telling us that the website address must be typed in as “http://www.pizzahut.com” seems a little behind the times. Perhaps Alli Berry should make updates to ensure that Pizza Hut is “accurately and effectively represented online” in the company’s literature.
- Boundegar
  
  Chrome is a corporate shill. Firefox doesn’t autocomplete pizzahu.
SomeGuyNamedMark

“…Pizza Hut, making sure that they are accurately and effectively represented online.”

Fine, post a picture of a pizza and of a hut. Done.
http://twitter.com/Nerd_Ferguson Nerd Ferg

“The Pizza Hut homepage can be found here”…unreal
nickdanger3deye

Too bad their effort goes into marketing rather than production. Pizza Hut gave up on making a quality product when they decided that their competition was Dominos and Pappa Johns in the early 1990s, and joined the race to see how cheap people were willing to go. For you young whippersnappers, Pizza Hut was once marketed as the high-end pizza chain, and put out a quality pizza.
- invictus
  
  Well, it certainly had delusions of being that and priced its products accordingly, yes. But I honestly can’t say the Pizza Hut products I had twenty years ago were that much better than the Pizza Hut products I had two months ago.
  - nickdanger3deye
    
    I remember that their pan pizza used to have a much better crunchy buttery crust and that their cheese was more flavorful, but maybe this is the glow of nostalgia and their serving me beer when I was underage.
- Donald Petersen
  
  Hey, if nothing else, Pizza Hut’s efforts to reclaim the delivery market from Domino’s in the late 80s helped to greatly improve the quality of Domino’s product. Used to be Domino’s pizza was downright terrible, but they were the only big chain that delivered, so you were stuck with them if you didn’t want to get up off your fat ass and pick up a pizza yourself. Once Pizza Hut started delivery, their market share rose dramatically. And it was only a couple of years ago when Domino’s literally acknowledged in their own advertising that they used to make pretty bad pizza, but now they were moved to improve it.
  
  And I have to agree with invictus. I ate a hell of a lot of Pizza Hut pizza twenty-five years ago. It pretty much tastes the same to me today.
  - http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns
    
    I know someone who hated the ‘Domino’s Is Now Better’ ads because she felt they were demeaning her for liking the old pizza. I’d make fun of someone for letting ads have power over them, but then I remembered that there’s still some PSAs that terrify me.
Thomas

Shouldn’t the link be to pizzahut.ca, since it was Pizza Hut Canada that put out the fragrance?
Shibi_SF

I wonder if Ms. Alli Berry is ever/often confused with Halle Berry.
- http://www.xradiograph.com/ OtherMichael
  
  What brand confusion, from an SEO optimizer? SHAME!
  - http://mordicai.livejournal.com Mordicai
    
    Are you kidding? That is like people who buy goggle.com or whatever; those typos are VALUABLE.
http://twitter.com/AntiBoredomTeam Dan Century

rel=”nofollow” makes me yesLOLlow!
http://twitter.com/AntiBoredomTeam Dan Century

BTW, rel is the Dalek’s favorite HTML attribute.
http://twitter.com/televod Matt Waters

I thought I was at the Taco Bell.
http://twitter.com/AntiBoredomTeam Dan Century

Exterminate all link juice!
GertaLives

Honestly, I’m glad to see Pizza Hut’s funds are directed towards awkward marketing efforts rather than lame legal threats.
vendorx

But where’s the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell?
- Donald Petersen
  
  I have a combination KFC/Taco Bell a block from my house. That’s almost as good.
  
  Weirdly, it’s the only drive-thru in my neighborhood with obviously bulletproof glass.
  - http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns
    
    I lived near a Long John Silver’s/KFC and the chicken tasted of fish. I can’t have kfc again, which is probably a good thing.
- http://twitter.com/rocketboy1971 rocketboy1971
  
  I’m at the combination PIzza Hut and Taco Bell.
  
  (Thanks a bunch, now I need mental floss.)
http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

Would this be a good time to mention that Pizza Hut pizzas are only slightly tastier than the cardboard boxes that they come in?
Andrew McKay

Unison: PIZZA THE HUT!?!?!?!
PTH: Well if it isn’t Lonestar and his trusty sidekick Puke!
Barf: BARF!
- mistwolf
  
  Played this for the first time for my kids the other day, they laughed their tiny butts off. Pizza the Hutt was an especial favourite, even though we never eat there. Apparently, there’s some song in Australian scouting involving fast food restaurants specifically pizza hut, that is fun to sing and totally not free advertising.
bolamig

The Canada page is http://www.pizzahut.ca/ and they should take issue with USA Alli poaching their link juice.
http://profiles.google.com/galoot Sean Pratz

This story discusses Pizza Hut without linking to it. Well played.
MatthewKrohn

Beats a Cease and Desist, which means they’re more internet-savvy than most of the remainder of legal corporate America.
Ramone

Ah, to be a PR monkey again. The thankless hours! The soul pulverizing! The prone positions whilst watching any last vestiage of self respect immoliated before my eyes by executive stooges!
sievetronix

Remember if you reproduce this letter Pizza is gonna send out for you!

http://youtu.be/33n-IS8a1S4
Jeremy Sebens

There is humor here, but at least it’s the food service industry we’re dealing with.

If the MPAA were managing this issue, this would have been a takedown request, including three pre-canned lawsuits.

For bonus fun it would have required that boing boing also remove the content from the pizza hut site, and deactivate the entire L’Oreal site for good measure.
http://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKarter Jeffrey Karter

C’mon, folks! The Pizza Hut SEO person wrote a nice, threat free letter which politely asked for a little bit of BoingBoing link juice. Compared to some of the other corporate correspondence that BoingBoing has reprinted, this is definitely one of the least offensive.

Of course, it’s not actually from Pizza Hut, and there’s no Thank You for mentioning them on the illustrious BoingBoing, and the link offered isn’t to the Pizza Hut Canada, who actually made/sponsored the perfume, but at least it’s better than some posturing wanna-be-takedown-notice.
- teapot
  
  A posturing wanna-be-takedown-notice would’ve been met by David with a different response?
http://splicedcomma.wordpress.com/ comma splice

I wonder if they were able to email Das Racist in time, before they broke up.
http://youtu.be/EQ8ViYIeH04
http://contraditorium.com Carlos Cardoso

So, you write a post using their product, make sweet cash over it, and when they ask for a simple link love, you act douchy as hell and insert a nofollow?
- David Pescovitz
  
  yep
http://www.facebook.com/micah.seymour Micah Seymour

As it’s Pizza Hut Canada that’s shilling the perfume shouldn’t that be http://pizzahut.ca/

And when do we Americans get crappy pizza with HOT DOG STUFFED CRUST?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Fischer/500021466 Mike Fischer

The email was pleasant and respectful. What more can you ask for?
- teapot
  
  Um.. No email?
teapot

Here’s a lesson in SEO kids: Links in comments are worth crap-all in relative linkjuice compared to a link in the body copy of a post.
Corey Marie Parkhill

I got this (nearly) exact same form email from someone representing Kohl’s when I wrote a blog post and didn’t link to them for a pair of $9 tights. I’ve been web-publishing since ’99, and SEO is creeeeepy.
azaner

Gotta agree with those who see the email as a polite request, and nothing more. The whole interaction now reads as Pescovitz being peeved and frustrated that his original snarky post (about an admittedly very odd product) was met with nothing but additional sincere effort to promote Pizza Hut products.
- http://twitter.com/chriscoreline chris coreline
  
  i for one am switching from Dominoes to Pizza Hut in the wake of how polite and non take-down-noticey this mail was.
  - creesto
    
    Ugh…can’t eat Pizza Hut pizza…nor Papa John’s (especially after Schnatter’s douchey ACA response) so Domino’s is much less offensive to MY little taste buddies…