Aside from being an online marketing junkie, I’m also an absolute sports nut! When I’m not working I’m generally at the gym, playing basketball or watching football. As a result, my interest is very much focused on the Beijing Olympic Games at the moment. I’ve been attempting to keep a close eye on the results of our Australian athletes. However, despite my best efforts, it seems that the people responsible for the official Beijing Olympics site are doing everything humanly possible to retain zero visibility within the search engines…
I discovered this fact yesterday as I was searching for the latest swimming results. I clicked over to Google and entered the search phrase ‘Olympic results’. It seemed like a pretty simple (and accurate) search query to me. So I was astounded to find that the official Olympic site failed to appear in the top 10 results. Instead, I was greeted with sites from the I.O.C., BBC and even Search Engine Watch. How very strange…
Ok… perhaps my search query sucked (although it seemed pretty damn logical to me!). Let’s try another one – ‘Olympic medal tally’. Surely that has to be one of the most popular search terms related to the Games. Apparently not… The top 7 positions are taken by a variety of sites including the ABC, the I.O.C and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (note these queries were run in Google Australia). The official Olympic site finally makes an appearance at number 8.
What the… This is the biggest event on the planet and I can barely find the official web site. It seems that while millions have been spent on the site itself, SEO hasn’t been given a thought. I decided to go across to Google Insights to see how the site fares for the top 9 Olympic search queries (I excluded one of the top 10 queries as it was a generic search for ‘nbc’). Just for good measure, I also threw in a few more search queries I thought were relevant. The results are below:
Ok… so they have managed to nail the top 4 generic search queries with a number 1 ranking. But beyond that, the rankings nose dive quicker than a Chinese diver off the 10 metre platform. Isn’t anyone embarrassed about the fact that the official Olympic web site doesn’t make the front page of Google for the search term ‘the Olympics’…?!?! I wonder how many other searchers out there are scouring the web like I was trying to actually find the proper Olympic web site…
Ultimately, the complete lack of SEO isn’t likely to hurt the Games too much. There is a massive audience for the Games and a huge thirst for information. People will take the time to find the site. But one thing is for sure, whoever did the SEO for the Olympics (if anyone) didn’t deliver a Gold medal performance. In fact, I’d say it’s far closer to that of Eric the Eel.
And one last thing… I don’t care what anyone says about Michael Phelps… Stephanie Rice owns these Games. Two gold medals, two world records… and she is DAMN HOT. You can have Phelps America… we’ll take our hot Aussie chick any day 
