SEO Case Study: Attorneys Chasing Vioxx Organic Search Ranking

Last week the drug manufacturer Merck pulled their pain relief medication Vioxx (rofecoxib) from the market due to studies linking higher incidence of heart attacks and strokes to long term use of their medication. The highly profitable medicine was aimed at Rheumatoid Arthritis sufferers and others who weren't able to stomach aspirin, which is arguably more effective than Vioxx is for most pain relief. Top search engine rankings for the trademarked word "Vioxx" were dominated by Merck-owned web site http://www.Vioxx.com site and http://www.fda.gov/cder/drug/infopage/vioxx/default.htm Third place for the single word "Vioxx" also belongs to an FDA page and fourth and fifth positions are owned by a site that appears to be a drug index at http://www.medicinenet.com/rofecoxib/article.htm at a medical site that dominates for many drug and medical terms due to extensive discussion boards and informational pages about thousands of medical conditions and their treatments. Seventh through tenth position are CNN's news story on the recall, then Yahoo News with a similar story, two online pharmacies with curiously blank pages. Try to sell Tylenol from those pages guys - don't waste the traffic with blank pages! Pay-per-click advertisements were posted by agressive class action attorneys to run alongside organic search rankings and appeared immediately on the day of the recall announcement. The first search for the word Vioxx done at Google on Friday October 1st brought up an advertisement for http://www.bigclassaction.com/class_action/vioxx.html which has a PageRank of 5 as of October 4th at 5pm Pacific time. The final ranked site of top 30 for the single word "Vioxx" at Google is the legal information site Findlaw in their class action section at http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm as well as the Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial at http://RealitySEO.com where this article appears with live links to SMO stories, buttons, blog posts and examples.