Information Correction: Getting paid to fix information on the Internet
There is a lot of bad and incorrect information on the web. For a business, this can be devastating.
But it also provides a huge opportunity for web entrepreneurs.
In fact, we’ve recently been doing consulting work with various businesses to help correct bad information Our hope is that by sharing our experiences, this article gives our readers another original business idea for how to make money on the web. We’re sure that there are 1000′s of businesses out there with this problem who could use your services.
Fixing information on the web isn’t easy. There are lots of factors working again you. For one, Google prefers old content to new content. Second, inertia has worked itself onto the web and many older sites have no interest in honoring your request to change the information they have about your client.
To give you a sense of what we’re up against, we’ll detail below the experience we’re having with one of our more challenging jobs at the moment.
College Startup was recently hired by the new owners of The Colonnade Inn to correct as much bad information on the internet as possible about the business. The Colonnade Inn has been owned by a variety of owners, and the transfer of ownership has not always gone as smoothly (or friendly) as one would hope. In the process, a lot of incorrect information has wedged itself onto the web.
Most notably, if you are looking for the contact information for The Colonnade Inn in Sea Isle City New Jersey you are just as likely to find the wrong phone number as the right one. When they call the wrong number, they still get an answering machine, leading them to believe they’ve left a message with the right organization, when in fact they haven’t! This is terrible, since so many vacationers these days are looking for information on the internet.
Our job is to fix this situation and make it much more likely that potential vacationers will find the right information.
However, the problem is exacerbated because the current webmaster and host for The Colonnade Inn is totally non-responsive. So, we’re getting no “on-page” help with our services. We can currently make no “on-page” changes. That sucks because if you notice, the front page of the site has literally no textual instance of the phrase “The Colonnade Inn.” We’re basically left to off-page strategies at this point.
Another complication is the fact that the previous owners never turned over the original domain for the business, and have proceeded to keep it up. As we all know, the Search Engines value age, and the old domain still yields power despite being totally useless.
There’s one more major challenge. This is an offline business that’s very niche. Finding high-authority, related web pages to link into site isn’t nearly as easy as you might imagine.
Our Plans To Correct Information
There are really two ways to correct information. Either change the old information, or create lots of new information so that the old information gets diluted and subdued. We’re taking both approaches going forward. Create new content with the right URL and the right contact information. Make it look like the authority site by linking with good anchor text from as many sites as possible.
1. We setup a Squidoo page on Sea Isle City, the location where the Colonnade Inn is found
2. We tried setting up an Wikipedia page on the Historic Colonnade Hotel, but failed. It was deleted within minutes. It was worth the try, however, because a Wikipedia page would have been golden.
3. We plan to use PRLeap and a variety of other press release services to announce the change of ownership at the Colonnade Inn and provide updated contact information
4. We plan to acquire as many authoritive travel, vacation and related-location based links as possible.
5. We plan to submit the site to as many new directories as possible
6. Finally, we plan to contact as many sites as possible who either have the wrong contact information or the wrong URL. Kudos to the Yahoo Directory for making the change within 24 hours of the request. Unfortunately, many of the smaller sites have been harder to get a hold of.
Interesting article. It sure has become a challenge to update the wrong information and links with the new updated ones.
I never really thought of getting the old ones removed by contacting the site-owners and I am sure most of the webmasters are not even interested as it is a tedious exercise, but all worth the effort as creating new content to surpass the old one, is anything but easy.
Thanks for the idea.