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White paper - search engine positioning and its impact
on brand reputation |
| In the course of the last net-update (July 2005)
we mentioned that a website we examined was outperformed on
a search engine by a hate site for its own company name. We
thought that we would come back to this, as it is an important
point to be aware of. |
| Lets take a rather extreme example of this to
illustrate the point. A search on Google for “Huntingdon
Life Sciences” shows that the company occupies top position.
However, eight of the next nine results can be described as
being hate sites. Remember, because of the popularity of Google
as a search tool, more people probably look at this page than
Huntingdon’s home page. |
| Its not too hard to see what the potential problems
are. Even without visiting any of the websites, you get a flavour
of their contents from the results page. It could scare off
potential customers, employees or even investors. That can have
a direct and negative impact on brand reputation. Even in the
wider picture, people previously undecided on the vivisection
debate, might find themselves influenced by the volume of material
and the emotive language used. |
| So if you find yourself in a similar situation,
what can be done about it? Well, before launching a costly PR
counter-offensive, or hiring a fleet of expensive lawyers, there’s
always the alternative of optimising your website. |
| Many website owners and webmasters only look at
getting the home page of a website to perform for the company
name. But not every website visitor has to come through the
front door. If there are a number of pages performing well for
the company name, then that denies search engine real estate
to other pages that might have less favourable things to say.
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