12 December 2007
A silver lining for northern rock?
The recent crisis at the Northern Rock bank was heavily publicised, with coverage across
a range of media. Whilst this is obviously very negative press and damaging to the
companies reputation, effects in the search engines are mixed.
Brand related searches, such as ‘northern rock’, give results of news articles from the
BBC, Guardian and other sources. These are obviously a reputation management issue for
the company, but can such negative coverage actually help?
Google’s relevancy algorithm focuses heavily on inbound links. In very simplified terms,
if a site has a lot of links pointing to its domain, then it is perceived to be an
important site. This will help the site rank better in relevant search results. The
problem with this ranking method is that the algorithm cannot distinguish between a site
linking positively and a site linking negatively. So for example, if many sites link to
site X to inform visitors that the site has malware and should not be visited, Google
will see the links and assume they are an indication that websites are recommending site
X.
So, is there a silver lining for northern Rock to take from this crisis? Google ‘quality’
link totals (obtained with the ‘link:www.domain.com’ search query) recorded at the
beginning of September was 164. This total has shot up 64% and is currently 456, which
may cause a rise in PageRank and will undoubtedly give northernrock.co.uk an uplift in
Google rankings. Yahoo totals have also increased, with a 68% change from 11,225 inbound
links at the beginning of September to the current total of 34,800. Again, site wide
visibility increases are likely to result in Yahoo search rankings.
