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Hurricane Katrina and Fast-Acting Search Results

September 6, 2005

When I added the Red Cross ad to the blog recently (please give to some type of rescue organization if you're able!), I was curious about the flurry of activity surrounding Katrina over the last week, and to what extent it had affected organic results pages. Unlike specific news engines (where I typically get my news), the organic algos are generally a little more sluggish (or stable, depending on your worldview). Still, when comparing results for [katrina] at large engines, I noticed several interesting results.

First, an analysis of the first page of Google results for the query [katrina]:

1. Red Cross root page (www.redcross.org). The #1 ranking for this site is due in large part their massive viral banner campaign (which we found out about thanks to Threadwatch). Also at play here, in my opinion, is the phrase "katrina" in close proximity to the link to redcross.org in blogs and news stories. For example, "To help victims of Hurricane Katrina, please give to the Red Cross." This "proximity credit" is an ages-old part of the algo that accounts for web coders who use "click here" as anchor text instead of the nearby money phrase.

2. National Weather Service's National Hurricane Center and Tropical Depression Predictor (nhc.noaa.gov). In case you're curious, the NOAA stands for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. If you're familiar with American bureaucracy, it should be no surprise that the NOAA is part of the US Department of (wait for it...) Commerce. The NOAA site, an XML/RSS smorgasbord, is to serious weather chasers what Slashdot is to 30-year-old gadget freaks living in their parents' basements. Plenty of legacy link pop here, probably using link text like Hurricane Katrina, since weather enthusiasts are keen to note (and anchor) the difference between tropical storm, tropical depression, hurricane, and so on. Also note that this site ranks in the top spot for [hurricane katrina] and [tropical storm katrina], so it's been building momentum for a while.

3. Wikipedia entry for Hurricane Katrina (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina). Yahoo shows over 24,000 links to this page, and at least right now, Wiki can do very little wrong in Google's eyes.

4. Home page of an on-the-ball web developer whose name is actually Katrina (katrina.com). She's had the domain for the better part of a decade, and probably had the top rank until about a week or so ago. Kudos to her - she's taken advantage of her rank to show tons of missing persons and disaster relief information. (Question to self: What's the moral and semantic opposite of a scraper called?)

5. Weather.com homepage (weather.com). Certainly helped by current radar images, slide shows, and the accompanying incoming links to those features. And it doesn't hurt that a "synonym search" at Google for [~hurricane] shows "weather" as a bolded phrase - meaning that Google's algo considers them very similar terms. LSI, anyone?

6. A Red Cross credit card contribution page tied to a specific site. Hard to say why Google picked this specific iteration of the "Contribute" page without further investigation. The link redirects from www to give.redcross.org, so the second subdomain (or maybe the https protocol) is probably the reason it's not an indented entry under the first Red Cross result at #1.

7. Official site of Katrina and the Waves (katw.com), '80s pop group behind such hits as "Walking on Sunshine" and ... um ...

8. See #7, but this time (katrinasweb.com) it's the personal site of the band's lead singer. Entries 7 and 8 are like the Moe Green of [katrina] - making their bones when the Red Cross and National Weather Service were going out with cheerleaders.

9. FEMA (fema.gov), likely helped along by some linking discussing their handling of the hurricane aftermath.

10. Local New Orleans TV station (wwltv.com) offering a prolific blog about events in the city as they happen. Yahoo shows about 16,000 links directly to this page, and over 72,000 to the domain.

So what's the moral here? Google loves links - all shapes, sizes, and locations. Linking during national crises is a hyperbolized version of natural linking. It happens more quickly and in greater numbers. Still, there appears to be no temporary link devaluation (TLD) or backlink over-optimization devaluation (BLOOD) going on here. Is the onslaught of new links spread out over enough sites as to appear natural (which it is), even with the accelerated timeframe? Apparently so, assuming there's no manual intervention going on.

In my next post, I'll tear apart Yahoo's SERP for the same query.

All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at September 6, 2005 10:32 PM
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