I have spoken many times of the risk that bad news can travel so fast in the Web 2.0 world and the importance of keeping on top of it through services such as Google alerts and Xefeed. Here is however a very real example of bad, bad news.

Type ‘Oz Experience’ into Google and third result reads:

Well, if you saw this just below the official site which result would you click? Pretty scary stuff - this is a real serious situation, as there is really nothing that can be done about.

What’s happened is that someone has written a forum post on why not to travel on Oz Experience on a website called Travelblog. The reason it is has risen up the search ranks so quickly, in only 118 days, for what is in effect a rather   competitive term is not initially obvious. Firstly, the page itself only has 115 links (according to Google) and they are all internal. But, Travelblog itself is a very reputable site - it has over 9,00 inbound links so with 115 links in the site to this page this is clearly pushing the importance of the page up. The page is also well structured - the frightful heading above being the h1 tag; then there is the number of times the words ‘Oz Experience’  appears in the content as post after post are added to the discussion. Note, many of them are positive for Oz Experience, but perhaps the damage is already done - there might even be a risk that the reader makes a decision based on this without even visiting the Oz Experience website (I hope not - we are only a matter of weeks away from releasing a new very cool website for them). The continual posts also mean the content is always fresh. A discussion in the office here at Xebidy decided that this situation is illustrative of Google adding more weighting to fresh and new content.

So what can be done? Probably nothing; perhaps as this post starts to fade away and less people add their own comments the content becomes less fresh and the forum topic falls out of favour with Google. Perhaps someone like STA Travel reads this blog - they are only 3 or 4 placings below in the search results.  As they have a massive number of inbound links and thus page rank, they could increase the number of in-site links to their Oz Experience page and hopefully rise up to third place pushing the bad news down the rankings.

The sensible course of action of course is to catch bad news like this very early on and get involved in the discussion, hopefully stemming the flow of comments and links to it and thereby reducing its’ popularity in the search engines. Identifying bad news early and addressing it head on is a web strategy I have talked about in my posts and articles (for example this one on Creating a Relationship with your Customer. Using tools like Google Alerts will go someway to helping you identify this sort of information early on the Internet. Alternatively, Xebidy offers an Interent and Social media monitoring service to our clients on a monthly subscriber basis where using our Xefeed product we can monitor a range of sources for information on your business, feeding bad news to the appropriate channels and even republishing travel stories and reviews etc onto your website. If you want more information feel free to get in touch.

Tags: Oz Experience, Web 2.0, XEFEED

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.