Pilipinas Kay Ganda Website Disaster Could Have Been Totally Avoided

I had the usual reaction over the new Department of Tourism campaign, about using a slogan that is not immediately recognizable to its target audience, blablabla, and that was the end of it.

My hair stood on its end though when I heard the news that the Pilipinas kay Ganda website URL, beautifulpilipinas.com, would lead to a porn site if you change one letter in the URL.

I was wondering why this mishap happened. Ok fine, I admit I'm indignant about it.

For us web developers who are also concerned about Usability and Search Engine Optimization, I believe URLs should be carefully chosen.  It represents yourself, organization, and in this case, your country.  New website names should be chosen :

1)  to immediately tell what the site is about
2)  for ease of use of the target users
3)  for easy finding of search engines or SEO

1)  Immediately tell what the site is about


I encourage anybody who wants to set up any webpage, whether a free blogspot account or a paid domain to carefully think over and list a bunch URLs.  Your URL or website name should clearly state what your website is all about.  For beautifulpilipinas, fine.  That passed that step.

2)  My next consideration, for usability:

• Is your chosen name easy to remember?  
• Is it short or at least an acceptable length?
• Did you put in dashes, underscores or numbers that might confuse your searchers?  Note that these are fine, as long as kept to a minimum and easy to remember.
• Are you using spellings that might confuse your searchers?
• Are there synonyms, same words with different meaning, that might confuse your users?

And the last 2 points is where things went awry.  Pilipinas, that stands for a country, can also stand for persons, the Pilipina. Westernize the words. Filipinas is also used to stand for our country, and course our women are more popularly called Filipina here and in other countries.

3.  Optimize for Search Engines  

To optimize your URL for search engines, it is as simple as following steps 1 and 2. But there are other things your web-developer should do in this step, and that could have avoided the disaster of the tourism website.

For the web developers-marketers part, we practice a standard procedure of searching out the potential URLs that can be used where we find:

-  related keywords being searched

-  how many searches have been done for the searched keywords in the past month or year

-  etc. etc.

This way, you can advice the client what may happen when using a particular URL, and let the client choose what suits the purpose.

Some people would prefer using the barely searched keyword, and is willing to take on the challenge of  getting people to visit. If people pick it up, then only you will be identified with that keyword.  Other people prefer to be safer, and will pick names with keywords already being searched.  

With this step alone, you will quickly see there are no searches for beautifulpilipinas.  Free advice:  Since the Philippines' tourism has been around for sometime you can think up and search for more words that people are actually using now when they want to visit or vacation in the Philippines.  Then you can think more of what words can be used for your taglines, etc.

Now search for beautifulfilipinas and you will see the obvious.  Lots of searches, and other keywords with searches are "beautiful filipina", "beautiful filipina women", and "dating filipina".  By now, even if you cannot imagine these could lead to a porn site, you will at least get that the country's synonym stands for its women as well.  And it is easy to read, what is being pertained to here is another kind of tourism industry that is not so wholesome as the Department of Tourism would prefer.
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Looking at it another way, the real winner in this situation is the website owner of  beautifulfilipinas.com because, by applying these simple steps mentioned above, now an entire country is looking at their homepage.  Lucky bastards.

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