<The Failure of Networked Systems The Oil Drum DrumBeat: January 7, 2008>

75 comments on Oil Price Touches $100 a Barrel; Signal of Pending Oil Shortages Ignored

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Gail the Actuary on January 6, 2008 - 9:02pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

I get the statistics from PRWeb on what is happening with the press release, from their perspective.

Most of the people who have read it, read it because they subscribe to PRWeb's news feed. Those who have read in on search engines generally seem to find it by doing a search for "peak oil", either with or without quotes. It is currently on page 2 of Google News using "peak oil" as a search term. It will probably migrate back, as it gets farther and farther from January 4.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=%22peak+oil%22&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&start=10

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Leanan on January 6, 2008 - 10:16pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

How does that work? Is it the number of links? The number of hits?

Would it have been better to post this the day the press released went out?

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Prof. Goose on January 6, 2008 - 10:26pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Yep, probably so...I didn't think about it from that perspective. Gah. Next time, I guess.

We're hoping to do more of these in the coming year with the various insights we generate, I am hoping for one every three or four weeks. But, it's a project in and of itself...

These people I work with: freaking amazing.

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Perpetual Energy on January 6, 2008 - 11:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Would you like a mega MSM email list to send this PR to?

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Prof. Goose on January 6, 2008 - 11:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I shall not turn it down P.E. theoildrum@gmail.com.

Cheers!

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mdsolar on January 7, 2008 - 2:47am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The way we (GPUS) do press releases is to try to have most of the main points as quotes. Sometimes these will be candidates for office to get them some exposure, but mostly this is to make it easy for the press to make a story out of the release. They don't need to do any interviews, just check with the press contact if there are any questions. There are usually three of four poeple quoted. It works sometimes. Might want to give it a try. Here is a recent example.

Chris

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Leanan on January 7, 2008 - 7:26am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Thanks, that's a great tip.

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Gail the Actuary on January 7, 2008 - 10:08am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The PRWeb guidelines suggests that most of the main points be in quotes also, because of a feature PRWeb has that uses the quotes.

What PRweb does, if this feature is used, is show a box near the top of the post with one or another of the statements in quotes in large type. Over time, the statement in quotes is changed, to be one of the other statements in quotes. The intent is to make the press release look "new", as far as search engines are concerned. Thus the January 4 release date for search engines would change, so it would stay up longer.

We are fairly close in this press release to using quotes. We use "According to TheOilDrum.com" several times. The sentence after these statements are generally important points in the story. If we had put quotes around the sentences, this feature could have been used. I am fairly sure we could change the web version of the post at this time, to add the refreshing feature. It would take the post off line for a short time while the editors reviewed our changes, but it could be done.

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DaveMart on January 7, 2008 - 8:37am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I would suggest that this site stops sutomatically making 'no follow' default - most of us here use nom de plumes anyway, so it would hardly be intrusive, and would improve the ratings of this site on Google no end

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Leanan on January 7, 2008 - 9:26am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

"No follow" is not for privacy. It's to discourage spam in the comments. Most of the spam we get is not actually trying to sell us anything. It's "link spam" - trying to get higher in the Google ratings.

Like this:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2143/161352

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DaveMart on January 7, 2008 - 9:33am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

How about using one of those things where you have to read weird letters and numbers to prevent spam?
It's just seems to be making life difficult in attaining more recognition for the subjects raised here not to get the highest possible Google ratings.

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john milton on January 7, 2008 - 9:41am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

How about using one of those things where you have to read weird letters and numbers to prevent spam?

That prevents folks who are blind from posting comments. I myself know a blind person who uses this site.

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Leanan on January 7, 2008 - 11:52am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I don't think it would work. These aren't spambots. They're human beings, cutting and pasting those blocks of links.

It's just seems to be making life difficult in attaining more recognition for the subjects raised here not to get the highest possible Google ratings.

Links in the comments don't increase Google ratings for us. They increase Google ratings for the sites linked to (if there's no "no follow" tag). So there's an incentive for people to post links to their sites in our comments, but no benefit for us to allow it. Google ratings-wise, anyway.

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Gail the Actuary on January 7, 2008 - 12:57am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I am not sure how Google works, but I think the rating is based on how many high rated sites link to the post. Thus, a front page TOD link is important, or an Energy Bulletin link. Energy Bulletin linked to this press release the day it came out, and reprinted it in full, and I think that helped. Thanks, Bart!

If wouldn't hurt to duplicate. A link in Drumbeat the first day would have been helpful. I put a link to it in the comments, but since it was only a comment, it had a "nofollow" attribute, so it didn't count as far as Google was concerned.

This press release moved into Google News right away, thanks to the links people made to it. We tried a press release relating to the Wall Street Journal peak oil article earlier, but it took five days to get into Google News. By that time it wasn't considered news any more. The earlier press release was only on Yahoo News, because Google didn't find it in time.

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Leanan on January 7, 2008 - 7:27am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I was going to put it in the DrumBeat, but since you posted it, I didn't. :)

This press release moved into Google News right away, thanks to the links people made to it. We tried a press release relating to the Wall Street Journal peak oil article earlier, but it took five days to get into Google News.

Are you sure that's the reason? I could see the ranking of stories being affected by links and things, but whether Google finds it all? Could it be that the difference this time was using PRWeb, rather than trying to go it alone, and not incoming links?

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Gail the Actuary on January 7, 2008 - 2:52pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

We used PRWeb for the Wall Street Journal response post, so that wasn't the difference. This time I started asking about getting links to the press release, early on, because of the problems we had with the earlier press release.

I think we need as many high quality links the first day as possible, to make the process work well.

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Leanan on January 7, 2008 - 5:49pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Wow, I didn't even realize we'd used PRWeb the first time. Or if I did, I didn't remember it. All the links went to TOD. PO.com, EB, AlterNet, dKos, etc.

Maybe that was the problem. Perhaps delaying posting it here was the right thing to do, to make sure the links go to PRWeb instead.

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75 comments on Oil Price Touches $100 a Barrel; Signal of Pending Oil Shortages Ignored

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