Ernst & Young’s ‘topless men’ problem could have been avoided

Nearly naked young men are probably not what Ernst & Young was hoping would come to mind when it changed its name to EY.

Perhaps the accounting firm should have run a Google image search first.

Doing so would have brought up a host of steamy pictures of scantily clad young men gazing into the cameras with sultry looks.

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As reported by my colleague Ricardo Lopez, the photos are from EY! Magateen, which apparently celebrates young men and their bodies.

There are only a handful of legitimate Ernst & Young logos that come up when one does a Google search of EY.

This didn’t have to happen, though.

Far ahead of the launch, EY’s website administrators could have changed the file names of logo images on its website to include “EY,� which would have helped its prominence in Google search results. As of Monday afternoon, the main image on the EY website was simply named “logo.gif.�

Though the alternate text for the image included both “EY� and “Ernst Young,� the image might be too new for Google to display it in the first set of results. (The alternate text is what shows up on devices that block images or is read when being accessed by someone who is blind.)

Other helpful strategies would have been a massive push at launch to get other popular media websites to share a copy of the logo with EY in the file name, alternate text and caption. All of the copies of the new logo and the incoming links to EY’s new site would have boosted the image’s value in the eyes of Google, pushing it ahead of the scandalous photos.

There are also sites such as BrandYourself, a free do-it-yourself Web product that enables users to control what people find when they Google you.

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