04 June 2009 | Author: R. Falconer SEO Consultant
Environmental organisation Greenpeace is using search engine rankings as the battleground in a form of direct action lobbying of the CEOs of major corporations. A search engine optimisation (SEO) competition has been organised to get certain Greenpeace pages as high as possible in the rankings for vanity searches of each of the CEOs. In doing so, it's possible they could face penalties for violating search engine guidelines.
Greenpeace has harnessed the power of the web for some time. Anyone who remembers Mr Splashy Pants will know how successful they have been in the past. Failure to understanding the entertainment side of viral campaigns is where many marketers fall down but this delicate balance is something that Greenpeace seems to understand.
It is clear from the group's website that Greenpeace has embraced Search Engine Optimisation in a style typical of the organisation. Their nofollowing of internal and external links is as passively aggressive as their campaigns to save the planet.
The Cool IT Challenge shows a lot of creativity and could only have been thought up by someone with a knowledge of search engine optimisation. They describe it as "a campaign to turn IT industry leaders into climate advocates and solution providers" and plan to do this using "public pressure, humour and a bit of luck".
The competition takes the green ratings of the world's biggest technology companies (IBM, Microsoft, Sun etc.) from SMART2020 (whose link Greenpeace have nofollowed) and created a league table with the information. Competition entrants then link to one of these CEO profiles from their site. By linking to a CEO profile from your site, you are effectively helping Greenpeace rank within the search results for that CEO's name. This is designed to act as a reminder to that person that they should be doing more to protect the environment.
The campaign is immensely innovative, imaginative and clever. Its subversive nature could also prove appealing and it should be successful on both social networks and natural search. However, one thing that will be very interesting to watch is how it will be viewed by search engines since it appears to break Google's webmaster guidelines. Here is a quote from the Greenpeace competition guidelines:
"To make it more interesting for web publishers, we're linking back to all referring sites. Every month we'll pick the three best referring web pages (based on the creativity of the content, not number of referrals) to add to our featured links list.
"Only the featured links get a share of the PageRank from this page, so be creative. (All the other links are included here using Javascript which search engine crawlers can't read.)"
That clearly violates the basic principles of Google's webmaster guidelines, which states:
"Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighbourhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."
The question is, will Google do anything about it? Should a website be allowed to blatantly disregard these guidelines, simply because it's for a worthy cause? If Google ignores it, does that cheapen the guidelines for everyone else?
The web and particularly search engines rely on sites linking to each other in a normal and healthy way. Greenpeace clearly understands the value (PageRank) of links - it is, after all, giving them away as prizes. How search engines rank pages isn't Greenpeace's problem but in nofollowing links to sites they should be supporting and blatantly disregarding the guidelines of the company who no-doubt provides them with a large amount of their visitors, Greenpeace has showed a surprising amount of disregard for the web ecosystem. It certainly puts Google in an awkward position - they now have to choose to either penalise Greenpeace, a move that few people are likely to welcome, or risk giving out the message that reciprocal links are permissible provided you solicit them as part of a competition.
Greenpeace's Cool IT Challenge - pushing the boundaries of SEO rules?
Environmental organisation Greenpeace is using search engine rankings as the battleground in a form of direct action lobbying of the CEOs of major corporations. A search engine optimisation (SEO) competition has been organised to get certain Greenpeace pages as high as possible in the rankings for vanity searches of each of the CEOs. In doing so, it's possible they could face penalties for violating search engine guidelines.Greenpeace has harnessed the power of the web for some time. Anyone who remembers Mr Splashy Pants will know how successful they have been in the past. Failure to understanding the entertainment side of viral campaigns is where many marketers fall down but this delicate balance is something that Greenpeace seems to understand.
It is clear from the group's website that Greenpeace has embraced Search Engine Optimisation in a style typical of the organisation. Their nofollowing of internal and external links is as passively aggressive as their campaigns to save the planet.
The Cool IT Challenge shows a lot of creativity and could only have been thought up by someone with a knowledge of search engine optimisation. They describe it as "a campaign to turn IT industry leaders into climate advocates and solution providers" and plan to do this using "public pressure, humour and a bit of luck".
The competition takes the green ratings of the world's biggest technology companies (IBM, Microsoft, Sun etc.) from SMART2020 (whose link Greenpeace have nofollowed) and created a league table with the information. Competition entrants then link to one of these CEO profiles from their site. By linking to a CEO profile from your site, you are effectively helping Greenpeace rank within the search results for that CEO's name. This is designed to act as a reminder to that person that they should be doing more to protect the environment.
The campaign is immensely innovative, imaginative and clever. Its subversive nature could also prove appealing and it should be successful on both social networks and natural search. However, one thing that will be very interesting to watch is how it will be viewed by search engines since it appears to break Google's webmaster guidelines. Here is a quote from the Greenpeace competition guidelines:
"To make it more interesting for web publishers, we're linking back to all referring sites. Every month we'll pick the three best referring web pages (based on the creativity of the content, not number of referrals) to add to our featured links list.
"Only the featured links get a share of the PageRank from this page, so be creative. (All the other links are included here using Javascript which search engine crawlers can't read.)"
That clearly violates the basic principles of Google's webmaster guidelines, which states:
"Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighbourhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."
The question is, will Google do anything about it? Should a website be allowed to blatantly disregard these guidelines, simply because it's for a worthy cause? If Google ignores it, does that cheapen the guidelines for everyone else?
The web and particularly search engines rely on sites linking to each other in a normal and healthy way. Greenpeace clearly understands the value (PageRank) of links - it is, after all, giving them away as prizes. How search engines rank pages isn't Greenpeace's problem but in nofollowing links to sites they should be supporting and blatantly disregarding the guidelines of the company who no-doubt provides them with a large amount of their visitors, Greenpeace has showed a surprising amount of disregard for the web ecosystem. It certainly puts Google in an awkward position - they now have to choose to either penalise Greenpeace, a move that few people are likely to welcome, or risk giving out the message that reciprocal links are permissible provided you solicit them as part of a competition.
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