Comments on: Forensic SEO Analysis Of United Airlines Google vs Chicago Tribune Story

By: Kenneth

Kenneth — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:29:32 +0000

So here’s the piece of this that confuses me: Investors acted on an incorrect piece of information they got from Bloomberg. Whatever the series of events leading up to it, it seems like Bloomberg is the company that flubbed here, much as they flubbed when they ran an obituary for Steve Jobs a few weeks ago.

Regarding Tribune, it looks like they didn’t really take any action at all in this, and in any event they’re not responsible for anything that Google did with their content. Their system was probably designed pre-Google News, if not pre-Google. Tribune isn’t required to cater their systems to Google or anyone else, so I don’t understand why any blame would fall on them. No investor says they sold United Stock because they read the article in a Tribune paper, they sold because they read it in Bloomberg. That fact isn’t really in dispute.

Google has a system that scrapes news, and everyone knows that no human being ever looks at it before it gets posted. It’s up to the journalists at Income Securities Advisors and Bloomberg to verify information before posting it. Failing to do that was essentially yelling fire in a crowded room, and neither Google nor Tribune caused them to do that.

Am I missing anything here?

By: Internet marketing nieuws van de afgelopen weken - bSeen Online Marketing Blog

Internet marketing nieuws van de afgelopen weken - bSeen Online Marketing Blog — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 08:10:11 +0000

[...] ander erg opmerkelijk nieuwtje deze week was het volledig instorten van de aandelen van United Airlines door een oud persbericht in de News Search. Â Andre Scholten kwam nog met een mooie blogpost over [...]

By: Micky

Micky — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:54:10 +0000

Great article and analysis. I have to say I’m amazed at how many ‘news’ articles can be found online on web pages without any indication of when the article was published. Worse still, if you proceed to read the story, it talks about ‘yesterday’ or ‘next week’ – and everyone reading it is left wondering whether this is current, or perhaps a few months old, or even a story from many years ago. It’s very frustrating, and it’s now been shown to be dangerous as well.

By: Google’s Googlebot Causes United Airlines Stock to Plummet Says Tribune Company

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:59:21 +0000

[...] 9/11/2008: BlogStorm has written a great post about what happened, and points out all of the duplicate content that might have caused the issue [...]

By: Is Google Making Us Stupid? … Obviously. | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:34:41 +0000

[...] a news story at multiple URLs without a proper publication date in the era of search engine optimization, or SEO, seems just a bit irresponsible for a major news [...]

By: Shane

Shane — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:27:47 +0000

Wow. I feel really bad for UAL and for whomever might face losing their jobs over not doing the most basic things to prevent it from happening. I hope this gets huge publicity, though, so that other organizations will panic and take steps now to be sure it never happens to them. Data backup and recovery was never much of a big deal until major catastrophes started wreaking havoc. Likewise, data security went largely ignored until huge blocks of sensitive consumer data were lost. And both of those took way more effort and capital expense than fixing this problem will.

By: Vinay

Vinay — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:25:07 +0000

One of the Best Article I have across at BlogStorm in recent time! Thumbs Up! Very very interesting analysis! Shows the Power of Digital media can bring in changes to Stock Value of a Company!

Cheers!