In a presentation that I gave at SMX-London last year, I used Somerfield (a supermarket chain in the UK) as an example of a firm that was having an issue with Universal Reputation Management. Back then, there was a YouTube video ranking for their name that was displaying with text talking about how Somerfield was not a nice place to work (basically the last comment on the video). Six months on, I thought I’d take a quick look and see if that problem was still there. As you can see, that comment has been replaced by a more recent, fresher one, in this listing displaying in the 10th position.

Good news for Somerfield, now there’s a barely literate semi-positive comment about them instead. Knowing the issues that they’ve had over the last year (see this self created reputation management issue from last Easter as an example), I thought I’d click on to page 2 and see if anything was bubbling up over there. There in 20th position was this listing. (note I’ve only edited the image to pull the Google bar under the image for display purposes).

Huh? The exact same URL on YouTube displaying in 10th and 20th positions. I went over one more page… Yep there it was in 30th… One more page, and there it was in 31st. The same URL, from a Google property, displaying 4 times in the first 4 pages.

I’m sure it’s not intentional, and I’ve not seen it for other searches that I’ve done, but if I were Somerfield I’d be monitoring that YouTube video as much as possible. I’d make sure that the latest comments were as positive as they could be, especially when this video is receiving as much SERP visibility for their name as it is.

Additional: It’s not just the video, it’s also happening with some listings. Do a search on Somerfield Massive, and look at the 10th result, which should be an article from the Independent on battery farming titled “How Do You Like Your Eggs?”. Go to the next page, there it is again, go to the next page, once more it appears there. In the first 150 results, I found that same article, with the exact same URL (no session IDs or strange parameters to throw it off) 5 times.

Update: Naturally the SERPs have changed so the actual results I found yesterday are not there (I’m glad I had Li confirm that she saw the same thing), but if you do that search for “Somerfield Massive” above, you’ll now see this blog post in 10th and 11th, at the same http://endlessplain.com url, so while the players have changed, the issue remains the same.

Filed under: Reputation Management on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine | No Comments
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.