Lions, and dentists, and reviews! Oh my!
Date: August 4, 2015Category: Author: Jaren Martineau
Cecil the Lion and Walter Palmer
Last week, news stories reporting that Walter Palmer shot and killed a popular lion affectionately known as Cecil spread like wildfire across the Internet. Palmer, a Minnesota dentist, and his team of big game hunting guides in Zimbabwe lured Cecil the lion away from the safety of Hwange National Park where he was shot with a crossbow and beheaded. Cecil was a well known lion on the preserve and was even part of an active scientific study at the time of the killing. Palmer claims that everything he did was legal and that all proper permits were secured.
The story set off a firestorm. Everyone seems to have an opinion and many are outraged and furious at what has happened to Cecil the lion. Protesters and hecklers have reportedly shut down Palmer’s dental practice and sent the dentist and his family into hiding. The online rage and mobocracy has manifested itself in calls for extradition to Zimbabwe, airlines refusing to ship large game trophy animals and even death threats.
Social vengeance and online reviews
Amid this fury and controversy, there have been many online attacks against Palmer. This anger has found its way even into Dr. Palmer’s online reviews. Dr. Palmer has had numerous phony negative reviews left on both his Yelp and Google+ pages as online activists look for an outlet for their anger. Here is a sampling of the social vengeance on the doctor’s Yelp page:
Yelp has taken down a large number of these obviously phony and inappropriate reviews and issued a statement that they are “committed to preserving the integrity of the review content on Yelp,” although the negative reviews continue to flood his Yelp page.
Palmer’s Google page similarly displays numerous 1-star reviews filled with angry statements and likely even false dental or other claims.
SEO results from these reviews
Regardless of how you may feel about Walter Palmer, or hunting in general, the story makes for an interesting case study on the impact that online press coverage and reviews can have on local search. Mike Blumenthal recently blogged that performing a Google maps search for “lion killer” shows Dr. Palmer’s website as the top result. I decided to run a few other searches to test the theory that the frequency of certain key words in the content of online reviews can alter which search phrases show up in a Google maps search. Here I searched for “killer dentist,” as well as “animal murderer dentist,” results of both searches include Dr. Palmer’s website.
And…the second search.
All of this demonstrates how quickly Google reacts to the content in online reviews—key words and phrases used in the reviews impact what search queries that your website can be found for in local search. When patients leave reviews that mention the specific types of services or treatments that they received there is the potential to positively impact your search results. This concept mirrors previous Google bombs in which searches for “miserable failure” resulted in webpages about former President George W. Bush or searches for “waffles” resulted in pages about former presidential candidate John Kerry.
This is something to keep in mind when you’re creating your online review generation strategy, trying to figure out why your website ranks for certain search terms, or how to get your website to rank for other search terms in Google maps searches. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t choose Dr. Palmer’s method of gaining publicity and online reviews.
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