Some great posts have already been written on the subject of reputation management in the SERPs via the creation of profiles at numerous sites like Blogger, Squidoo, MySpace, Technorati, Yahoo! 360, Flickr, et al. My favorites are:
- Fighting Off Negative Publicity and Affiliates in the SERPs - SEOBook
- Tips for Controlling the Top Ten - Graywolf
But, another issue exists as a correlary to these "reputation management" techniques. How ethical is it to control the search results for someone else through profile creation and SEO?
For example, let's say you're a publisher, selling a book by Otis Waftengard. Otis builds a site to sell his book and you, the publisher, place his book for sale on your site. As a business move, you decide that it's valuable to have Otis' book on your site outrank his personal site, since you can then take a higher percentage of the revenue. Otis isn't too savvy about SEO, but you decide to build links and get noticed for selling Otis' book.
If you employ tactics like the use of Flickr, MySpace, Blogger, Squidoo, etc. to build profiles (ostensibly of Otis Waftengard) and place links back to your site, have you been deceptive? manipulative? unethical?
Obviously, if you were a competitor of Otis', writing about the same subject and you chose to smirch his online reputation by creating misleading or negative pages about him, you'd be in unethical territory. But, if the difference comes down to where the links point and who controls the content, is there a difference?
What would you do fi a client wanted to control the search results for a proper name without that person's permission/agreement?
Related:
https://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1181
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I'm pleased at the coincidence. I'm assisting a client/friend on this issue also.
What is different from days of old is that old news and old events that were reported on from the past are easily accessable on the web. Its astonishing. It is remarkably easy to access all sorts of info on people from your home. That was never the case in the past. Wanted to dig up dirt and facts on someone...it used to take lots of research.
When I read information off the web on my friend/client I found an extraordinary amount of detail from events from years ago from a wide range of documents.
That also means if someone wants to continue to besmirch someone else all they need to do is keep publishing information with the target's name and it is accessable to one and all.
I think Michael is correct. This should be a big issue over the next several years.
There was discussion on this earlier in the week on WebMasterWorld.com, where somebody from MSN asked the community if this type of manipulation constitutes Spam or not. Interesting thought. I'm seeing more and more people use venues such as MySpace as an Advertising platform for other things/sites/etc.
Rand,
Good topic but I think this sort of issue falls within something more general than say profile crations or reputation management.
Re: the Publisher example, that's the classic case of SEO between the main seller v. reseller. We've seen similar issues ourselves - where the affilates/reseller were so agressive, the actual company had no chance to weasel in the top 10, 20 placement. I've heard as bad as not being #1 for their own company web site, which has a relatively unique name.
Indeed, the ethics are difficult to grapple with. You need the resellers, but you want to make more money by selling directly (and thus need to rank higher).
And as for the competitors doing that - that's similar to a classic PR smear campaign. In less abstract corporate terms, I think everyone knows of someone, or heard of someone, that placed a fake MySpace profile of their hated former/current boss.
On "What would you do fi a client wanted to control the search results for a proper name without that person's permission/agreement?":
I think that's clearly a concern and in many cases unethical. But to think in more general terms, could it be argued that targeting a person as a brand the same an online bag store wanting to get top placement for the Louis Vutton (sp) name?