Changing a towns name for Google makes no sense

Mon 2 March 2009 09:47, Bas van den Beld

Google has a big influence on our lives. More than many of us will probably realize. But that the 'power of Google' would be so big that even the names of towns would be changed, few would have foreseen.

The small French town Eu, with a population of 8000, announced last week it is thinking about changing the name of the town to be ranking better in Google. But why? It seems to have no use what so ever.

A search for "Eu" in Google.com brings up 711,000,000 results, most of which are about the European Union. The small town however is buried somewhere in between those millions of results.

Since the town is depending for a great deal on tourism, with a castle and several gardens, the presence on Google is becoming more and more important to the town. The town-mayor believes tourism revenues are down by a third because of the town's name.

The mayor of Eu, Marie-Françoise Gaouyer, says Eu only has two options: to start paying the search engines or to change their name. "As far as the internet is concerned, we have to bring ourselves up to date." The name might be changed into "Ville d'Eu" (Town of Eu), "Eu-le-Château" or "Eu-en-Normandie".

However, there are some 'buts' to the whole story. First of all there is the comment Google made. Apparently in Google.fr a search for "Eu" does bring up the french town as number one in the results. And second, how many possible tourist are actually only searching on the term "Eu" when trying to find this specific town? Numbers show that more and more searchers are using multiple search terms. And a search for "Chateau Eu" for example does bring up the towns' castle. Maybe the town needs some SEO-lessons first.

It seems that maybe the planned name-change could be a smart way of getting some attention, because if it will really 'help', I don't think so...

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Comments (2)

- geir ellefsen
- [website]
This is a good link bait imo :)

Ma 2 mrt 2009, 10:44
- Michel Kompanje
Just bringing out this news gives them lots of promotion. Nice work of the mayor ;)

Ma 2 mrt 2009, 22:22

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