One dark night, when you were all in bed, I had a very enlightening conversation with a small group of people in a bar. What was said there will be alluded to here in this blog but the names and details of what is discussed in a bar, remains in a bar.
Wednesday night, President Obama stated in a press conference the name of the virus that is infecting the world. What did he call it? Not the ‘swine flu’ but the ‘H1N1 virus’. The World Health Organization? Same thing. The Centers for Disease Control? Same thing.
So why if all of these official organizations call this virus the ‘H1N1 virus’ is CNN still calling it the ‘swine flu’? The answer is simple . . . SEO dominance!!
You see, CNN.com is ranked on the first page of Google.com for ‘swine flu’. Thus, the longer they can keep the nation searching for ‘swine flu’ and the longer they can continue to rank well for ‘swine flu’ the more traffic they can generate and (in theory) the more money they can generate.
But Brent you are wrong! CNN is calling it both. They aren’t avoiding the use of ‘H1N1 virus’ just for SEO! Well, actually they may be using it for both but they are definitely optimizing for the term ‘swine flu’ over ‘H1N1 virus’. How can I tell?
We all know (or should know) by now that the title tag is the most powerful onpage HTML element for an SEO to utilize. I know that CNN.com knows this and I also know that the SEO firm that consults for CNN.com also knows this. So, being a curious fellow, I decided to do a little query on Google for “site:cnn.com intitle:’h1n1′” and compare it to “site:cnn.com intitle:’swine flu’”. The results are very interesting!
Notice that CNN.com only puts ‘H1N1′ in the title tag 8 times. But they put ‘swine flu’ in the title tag hundreds and hundreds of times. So, yeah CNN.com is definitely favoring ‘swine flu’.
Perhaps this is why:
Google Trends is telling us that now that swine flu anything is possible . . . even the creation of a search term that gets more volume than porn! A few of my late friends are even ice skating according to my ouija board. 
Note: That was a poor attempt at a ‘when pigs fly’ joke.