Dinner: Impossible SEO - Robert Irvine vs. Michael Symon

As one might expect, we received a number of visitors this weekend from searches for Chef Robert Irvine and the Dinner: Impossible scandal that erupted earlier this year. By some fortunate coincidence, as I channel surfed last night I came upon the next to last episode for this year’s Next Food Network Star and they included a promo for Michael Symon’s Dinner: Impossible kickoff — a special presentation that followed the Next Food Network Star show.

So I watched Chef Symon take on Boardwalk Cuisine in New Jersey. It was a very jarring transition, almost like watching the first season of a new television show. The format stays basically the same, although they dropped the Mission: Impossible motif in the show’s introduction. Chef Symon was taken to the New Jersey Boardwalk and told he had to prepare a feast for 300 Boardwalk vendor employees using only ingredients from their shops in 8 hours. There were mishaps galore and perhaps a new American treat was devised (chocolate-coated bacon, of all things).

If you search for the keywords Dinner: Impossible today you’ll find references to Chef Robert Irvine, the former host of the show, in the search results. Chef Michael Symon has not yet become entrenched in the Web psyche’s vision of what the show is about. My feeling is that Google’s freshness algorithms, combined with food bloggers and journalists across North America, will quickly create some inroads (the contributors at Wikipedia have already done their part) for Michael Symon into the Dinner: Impossible name space.

As search engine optimizers we have a rare opportunity to watch a natural search transition unfold (assuming none of you take advantage of the situation and intentionally distort the results). Although the Dinner: Impossible name space is very active, it is not yet an SEO-competitive query space. A lot of people like the show, they write about the show, and they create a fair amount of content about the show. And A LOT of people search for that content on the Web.

The space is almost NOT commercialized — there are no spammers trying to make a quick buck off of stupid AdSense mush. Nor are the spammers likely to crawl into the space very quickly because some of those food blogs are extremely powerful (powerful enough that Food Network has begun including food bloggers as guest judges on major shows like Iron Chef America and Throwdown with Bobby Flay). The traditional news media are all over the space, too.

So as long as the search engine optimization community exercises some restraint and stays out of the space, we all have an opportunity to watch and learn as a non-competitive (by our standards) but highly active query space churns through a major transition in relevance. Dinner: Impossible has long been associated with Robert Irvine (whose personal name space is about six times more active than Symon’s at this time).

There will also, I think, be significant transitions in both Irvine’s and Symon’s name spaces. Their fans (and critics) will continue to write new content about them, and Irvine has taken the first steps toward engaging with his audience outside the Dinner: Impossible arena. Irvine is well-positioned to launch a new show, assuming the decision-makers at the various television networks can focus on reality and get over the faux trauma of his scandal.

Michael Symon, on the other hand, has put his reputation on the line in a very big way. If Dinner: Impossible loses audience share, he will be blamed for the show’s decline. But if the show maintains its audience or even grows its audience, he’ll get the credit for elevating the show’s success. The food lovers of the world are watching and waiting to see what happens. Although this first episode was pretty rough compared to the polished performances Irvine was giving his audience, I think people will give Symon time (and encouragement) to work out the kinks in his team and process.

I don’t know how many chefs can step into a situation like Dinner: Impossible. I suppose a lot of good cooks and professional chefs alike could prepare a large meal with relatively little advance notice as long as they have sufficient help, supplies, and equipment. But Irvine and Symon have both run into situations where equipment either didn’t work, or didn’t work as needed, and people lagged in meeting their deadlines. Both chefs managed to figure out ways to make the meals happen (although Irvine did miss some goals along the way, so I would not be surprised if Symon also occasionally fails to deliver everything required).

The level of skill required to meet a Dinner: Impossible challenge elicits a lot of respect from food bloggers and the viewing audience. That respect will continue to drive both search traffic and Web content creation for as long as the show and the two chefs remain active. The natural optimization that occurs as a fan community comes together and develops its concepts around a show and its stars, as the Web sites link to each other, and as new content is created is very different from what happens when everyone decides to invade the real estate, travel, and health foods name spaces.

You don’t have professional SEOs building blogs and Web sites about Food Network stars. The closest I’ve seen our community come to influencing the cooking world’s online community was when hostile SEOs attacking Dave Pasternack of Did-it realized they were causing collateral damage to a popular chef by the same name. You can now find content about both Dave Pasternacks in the front page search results for their shared name space.

That’s a very important consideration to make when you’re engaging in reputation management. You can’t just think about protecting your client’s name. You need to show some courtesy to other people who may share that name space (and in rare situations two or more companies or organizations may share a name space, too). The last thing you want to do when moving hostile content out of a query is to ignite an SEO war with someone.

Today I see a lot of SEOs flooding their name spaces with silly social media profiles. One SEO now dominates his name space for about six pages’ worth of search results with crap social profiles. Anyone else who shares that guy’s name is out of luck. In my own name space I have never tried to take control over all the search results. I have allowed the search engines to naturally promote content as much as I possibly can, while focusing only on my personal official Web site. It’s both unfortunate and embarrassing that you usually find 5-7 sites about me when you search for “michael martinez”, but I did not put those sites there.

Which is not to say I would be immensely grateful if the search engine suddenly dropped most of the sites about me from the search results. Those sites ARE relevant and people DO link to them because of me. I understand the process well enough to know that the algorithms are limited in what they can do, but they do still achieve some measure of variety.

The same process applies with the name spaces for “Chef Robert Irvine”, “Chef Michael Symon”, and “Dinner: Impossible”. There is a lot of relevant content out there for the two men and the show, and some of that content is supportive while some of it is critical. There are certainly a fair number of hostile bloggers out there who have written sensationalist headlines for anti-Irvine posts; but there are also some very open-minded and supportive bloggers who try to keep a balanced perspective through all this.

Assuming no one in the SEO community intentionally manipulates the search results, I think the open-minded and supportive bloggers who encourage both chefs to continue achieving personal success will be among the most popular sites to rank in these three name spaces. Of course, anyone can learn how to optimize for search and there is a chance that someone with an axe to grind will learn basic SEO and use it to attack either or both chefs. I certainly hope that doesn’t happen.

Over the next 3 to 6 months I think there will be some clearly visible transitions in the “Dinner: Impossible” name space. The Food Network is promoting the show and the media have a real reason to discuss it. The viewing audience also has a reason to discuss the show. So the SEO community should keep an eye on these search results and see what happens.

You can learn a great deal about search engine optimization when you don’t try to grab the top search results for a query, but rather just observe and analyze. You could not create an SEO experiment this complex, this natural, this comprehensive. It may be a long time before you get another chance to learn about SEO in this way.

NOTE: Yes, this post is structured to invade all three name spaces. I didn’t see a way to discuss the topic without being relevant to them, so rather than dilute one more than the others I’ve tried to dilute them all equally. You cannot really discuss a query space without becoming relevant to it.