French town of Eu to change name because of Google searches from the Telegraph is getting a lot of attention. In short, a town named Eu is considering changing their name, because they feel they have a hard time ranking for their name in Google, due to it being "eu" and thus feel they are losing out on tourism.
Let me quote you part of the article:
Marie-Françoise Gaouyer, the local mayor, now has two options - to pay internet giants like Yahoo and Google thousands to put the town at the top of all "Eu" searches, or change the town's name."The second option appears the most sensible," said Mrs Gaouyer, adding: "As far as the internet is concerned, we have to bring ourselves up to date." Mrs Gaouyer's favoured option is Ville d'Eu (Town of Eu), with other possibilities including Eu-le-Château and Eu-en-Normandie.
The mayor, who believes tourism revenues are down by as much as a third because of the town's current name, now wants all of the alternatives put to the local population of some 8,000 in a referendum.
As Vanessa Fox < ahref="http://searchengineland.com/what-france-can-teach-us-about-search-success-16744">points out, the town does rank number one in Google.FR for eu. Why? As Vanessa explains, their web site has a .fr extension and is entirely in French, which means it is targeted to French users. A tourist that doesn't speak French won't understand the web site and Google knows that. So Google does rank that site number one for the term "eu" in Google.Fr.
Vanessa said if they made a tourist version of the site in a different language, then maybe it would compete for the term "eu" in Google.com. I am not too sure about that, take a look at the search results for that term. I guess it is possible over time, plus I doubt the paid search results would cost that much.
Is the solution to your ranking issues to change your name or to evolve your web site?
Forum discussion at Sphinn.
