Search Marketing Blog
Online Reputation Management: Don’t Let One Bad Apple Spoil The Basket
Posted by Tyson Braun on 03.16.2009
Businesses today expend significant effort to achieve highly ranked search listings within the major search engines. Potential customers who are unfamiliar with their brand often perform searches to research the company. The pages returned from a branded search query serve as the first impression of the business, and may be the decisive factor in customers’ buying decisions. Even the most well established brands can see years of hard work disappear due to a prominently positioned listing that contains damaging content within their relevant search results.
One bad apple CAN spoil the whole basket.
A common practice for both individuals and businesses is to ‘Google’ themselves to discover the Web pages that exist on the Internet that pertain to their name or brands. Sometimes the outcome of this exercise returns a negative or undesirable result within Search Engine Results Pages (a.k.a. SERPs). When this happens, it can obviously be frustrating and disappointing to learn that customers, prospective employers, and the general public can find malicious content or a harmful or irrelevant news story. Frequently, the first response is to contact the search engines in an attempt to have the page deleted from the index. This, however, almost certainly will be an exercise in futility.
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s spam team, says he receives these requests so often that he has created a standard e-mail reply, which includes:
“We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say ‘Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.’”
Essentially, you are on your own. So what can you do to reclaim your SERPs?
Online Reputation Management
At EngineWorks, we offer Online Reputation Management services to ensure our clients put their best foot forward across the online search landscape. These services focus on seeking-out and destroying highly ranked search listings that contain negative content pertaining to our clients’ brands.
Our concerted efforts, designed to ‘knock down’ negative search results, can be separated into two proven strategies:
1. Boosting the position of favorable pages that compete with the negative listing (s)
2. Creating and promoting new highly optimized SEO landing pages
Know Your Enemy and Where You Stand
Before you can defeat negative listings, you need to know who you’re up against. How many negative listings are out there? Where are they ranking? Why are they ranking so well? It’s also important to understand which pages are losing to this negative result. For example, if a negative result pertaining to your brand is ranked #8, what are the listings in positions 9 through15? Also, which pages do you want to see on the SERP? Once you understand the pages you are up against, and which pages are on your side, you can draft a game plan to reclaim your important search engine real estate.
Since the search query includes your businesses’ brand name, the site’s sub-domains and well-optimized landing pages are likely to earn unique listings within relevant search results. Take note of these pages. Also, be on the look-out for positive or even neutral listings (where’s that Wikipedia entry?) that you don’t control, but you’d like to see returned higher than the negative listing.
Boosting Those Pages
Now that you have identified the list of results you’d like searchers to find when they search for your business, you can start doing everything you can to improve the rankings of these pages. The easiest way to accomplish this is to send them a link.
A link to a Web page is at ‘vote’ for that page, and is a major factor for the search ranking algorithms. However, not all votes are created equal. Links from pages with a higher PageRank, Google’s 1-10 score of a site’s authority, have more influence on rankings than pages with low PageRank scores.
So vote! If you don’t vote you can’t complain, right? Find a reason to link to these the pages from your homepage or other pages with a high PageRank score. Also, be sure your site utilizes PageRank sculpting (i.e., adding No-Follow tags to internal links that you do not want to be returned in SERPs, thus disallowing the beneficial ‘vote’ to that page). Through PageRank sculpting, the valuable ‘link vote’ passed on to pages such as the ‘Privacy Policy’ page are conserved, making other links more valuable, resulting in higher rankings for the linked pages.
Leveraging Social Media
There are several authoritative sites that you or your business can take advantage of by creating content and profiles, and then linking to the pages you identified earlier. Start by creating a Squidoo Lens, a Wikipedia Page, an E-How Profile, a Facebook Page, a Flickr Account, a Twitter Account, and a LinkedIn Profile. There are many more informational sites and social networking sites available. However, this list is a great start.
These sites not only enable you to create new pages within relevant SERPs to rival a negative result, but can also be used to boost sub-domains, landing pages, or other pages you identified earlier through links. Use these social media sites to highlight these pages, not just your homepage. Squidoo, with its feature of creating a ‘Lens’ on any topic, is particularly effective for this purpose.
Creating New SEO Landing Pages
Adding another horse in the race is a great way to increase your odds of ranking for an important search phrase. When creating an SEO Landing Page on your site, remember to have the page carry a single theme-in this case, your brand. Take a look at your current SEO Landing Pages, if they are too long (about 500 words is a good length) or unfocused; consider breaking them into two separate pages so that you can benefit from double the real estate on SERPs.
Craft these pages with a clear theme surrounding your targeted keyword and link to it appropriately. Monitor the rise of this page on the SERPs for your query, and treat it to the boosting techniques you passed on to the other established pages.
Don’t Let Your Flag Carriers Hurt Your Cause
In many cases, especially for businesses, the undesired result is a news story, column, or blog post. The writer uploaded negative content and then welcomes readers to comment. At first this comment invitation seems great, a chance to redeem yourself or let your loyal customers sing your praises.
Take for example a recent online news column blasting the quality of hammers manufactured by Acme Co. (Obviously, the names have been changed to protect the innocent.) In this instance, a columnist published a rant against Acme. The column appeared on a popular news site and over the last 5 months when a searcher enters ‘Acme Hammers’ into Google, this negative column ranks #4!
After reading the story, you may find that at the bottom there is an option for anyone to share their thoughts through comments. Satisfied customers of Acme may want to refute this negative review. But these supporters are doing more harm than good. By defending Acme Co. through the story’s comments, this page benefits from fresh and highly relevant content for several of Acme’s targeted search queries!
Let’s say they come to the rescue with this comment:
I completely disagree with this column about Acme’s hammers. I have been going to Acme from years whenever I need to buy hammers, and have never experienced the problems this columnist claims. He writes that Acme makes awful hammers with inferior materials, rather than using high quality hammer materials, which everyone knows is not true. What a joke! Acme makes the best hammers money can buy!
This is a tempting comment to write, and maybe a few people will actually take the time to read all the way down to the comment, but at what cost? This page now not only ranks well for ‘Acme hammers’ but could rank for other similar keywords (in bold) that were just added to this negative page. Your supporters just aided the enemy!
OWN YOUR BRAND
Businesses understand how important it is to ‘own’ their brand. They know that many customers perform search queries pertaining to their company or brands just to see ‘what comes up’ in Google. And, let’s be honest, a scandalous or negative story will grab the searcher’s attention! Controlling branded SERPs is important to all businesses. Don’t let one bad apple spoil all the favorable search results pertaining to your brand.
Here are some other great articles with advice to own SERPs:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-wont-remove-that-page-you-dont-like-but-you-or-your-seo-can
http://www.scoreboard-media.com/reputation-management-guide/
http://www.stuntdubl.com/2007/07/11/reputation-management/
"Text to speech" 07.17.2009 at 9:47 pm
Businesses understand how important it is to ‘own’ their brand. They know that many customers perform search queries pertaining to their company or brands just to see ‘what comes up’ in Google.