Guard Your Link, Lose The Story

INDEX TO PRIOR STORIES

In the old days of media, we liked to have all of our information in one place.  All people had to do was go to that one place and they had the answers.  Makes perfect sense, but it is as bad advice as one can ever give.  The problem with putting everything in one place is it kills the effort to bring in new followers to the hub page, EVXX.com.


Imagine a wheel with multiple spokes.  Every spoke leads back to the core, or hub.  In the Internet, pages like mine are nothing more than a spoke.  The link takes readers to the hub, where they can gain more information.  New readers find my page and follow it back to the hub.  This helps keep the hub higher in search rankings so it is easier to find in the first place.

At the Press Conference

Sometimes people become possessive.  They stop posting other people's links.  Other times they don't like the information on one of the spokes, so they quit linking to it.  With fewer links, we have fewer spokes.  That means the main hub gets fewer visits and falls in page rank.  Being possessive of your spoke is a sure fire way to lose new readers for your cause.


That is why the YouTube videos I have done are important.  They draw traffic to my site, which sends traffic to our main hub.  Knowledgeable media people put photos and videos in a general file and let the press make their own compilation.  It all leads back the main cause.  Take the America's cup for example.  They put all of the information in a file and the media can use the pics to tell the story as they see fit.  Once the story is done it leads back to the main America's cup page.


There was a short time when you could put Nina in your search engine and end up on one of our pages.  Not any more.  Today, you have to be more descriptive in order to pull up the basic story.  Now, it takes "Sailboat Nina" or another descriptive term in order to have the basic story pop up.  If you search for just Nina, you end up with a story about a Spanish girl.


Sure enough, someone is bound to say, "not on my search engine."  It would be more accurate to say, "not on my computer".  Once Google figures out what stories you like they begin to find links that match your I.P. preferences.  If you really want to know what pops up in a fresh search, you have to go to a computer that has not been taught to go to our story.  I tried this recently.  The results indicate the Nina is behaving like any other news story.  It is fading.  We are losing the battle in the press because some of our supporters are cross posting the pages of others.

Why is it important to get fresh fish, so to speak?  The answer is, we need more support to accomplish our goals.  We need new fans to help fund the cause.  We need new readers to keep all of our pages high in the mind of the public.  Our sailors need new looks so the story remains fresh in the view of the yachting public.


When I worked on the Lady Domina case, all you had to do was put "lady domina" in the search box and a dozen stories came up about the missing yacht.  Today, put the same words in the computer and mostly what you get are nasty links to sites that have nothing to do with a missing boat.  This happens to every story in time.  They call it "old news".

The best way to keep a story in the news is to create a hub and spoke system.  Then, from time to time, create an event, create the news.  The word will get out if you do.

On June 4th, 2013, the sailing cruiser Nina went missing.  The RCC-NZ suspended the search on July 5th, 2013.  Since then, the families have been trying to make the world aware of the desperate plight of the sailors on board the stricken craft, the Nina.