Holding companies to account with Google Finance

UPDATE AND CORRECTION: Seth Finkelstein, who technically definitely knows what he's talking about, points out: "Note: Exposing Yahoo, Inc., or other companies, by having blog posts show up on a company's page in Google Finance, is accomplished by having the post rank highly for the company name, not company ticker symbol." He goes on to explain the algorithm further.

Thanks to Kathryn Cramer for pointing out that her blog post about Secure Computing's export of censorware, tagged with the company's ticker symbol "SCUR," now appears on the Google Finance page for Secure Computing.
 

When blogging about a company, if you want investors to know, be sure to tag your post with the company's ticker symbol. full name (see correction above). I just went back and tagged my most recent post on Yahoo!'s abominable behavior.

How long will this last before the spam and p.r. blogs overwhelm the independent voices? Stay tuned..

Comments

[Don Marti]

Any readers who have PR Newswire accounts can do something similar by putting a stock symbol in a press release. Last I checked, this will make the release come up in the company news section of finance.yahoo.com.

[Dominic Jones]

The spammers have already figured this out, unfortunately.

That's why I think there should be some sort of accreditation or validation program for legitimate bloggers who want to provide perspective on public companies via Google Finance and other finance sites that follow GOOG's example.

This is too valuable an opportunity to mess up.