We recently completed an interesting reputation management project and I thought it'd be helpful to post our strategy and results to the SEOmoz community. My hope is that you'll read this and get some ideas, or even better, you'll point out some areas that we overlooked or things we can do to improve our approach.
The Client's Problem
Our client approached us with a problem that we are now seeing fairly often for many companies. As you began to type our client's brand name into Google Search, Google Suggest displayed our client's brand name + the word 'scam' as the second option, directly below their brand name. Talk about damaging your reputation!
We signed a confidentiality agreement, so I can't say specifically who the client is, but below is a screenshot from another large company, Direct Buy, whom we found experiencing a very similar issue.
Our client believed they were losing a lot of business due to this issue, particularly in the case of people who were ready to buy, but then went to do a Google Search to learn a bit more about the company before they plunked down their credit card. There is a great quote from Dave Naylor on this exact problem, "If Google Suggest's second result is 'scam', then people WILL click on it". These customers likely clicked the 'scam' recommendation and were scared off from purchasing from our client.
Our client is not a fraudulent organization in any way, and they offer real services and products to their customers, but the way they offer service is also complicated and in a volatile industry where no company is without its detractors. Even though they deliver their product as stated, and 99% of their clients love it, there seemed to be a small percentage that just weren't happy. Some of these unhappy customers took their gripes to the web. Additionally, there were also a high number of obvious cases where competitors were posting negative information about the company in order to damage their brand. We would not perform reputation management for any company that was a scam or participated in fraudulent or misleading activities, and after fully researching the business, we were 100% comfortable with helping them with their problem.
Because of all of this negative content about our client, when someone indeed clicked the '[Insert Brand Name] Scam' suggestion from Google Suggest, they were finding the first 2 pages of results filled with very negative 'flames' about the company. Some of this negative content was on personal blogs and others on complaint sites and forums. There were even a few positive reviews on blogs that were inundated with numerous scam accusations in the comment section, thus making a positive article turn very negative and harmful to the brand.
Our Research
Before diving right into what we did to change this, I want to talk a little bit about some research we did on this issue. We wanted to understand, as best as we could, how this problem came about. We hypothesized that very few people actually typed in 'brand name scam' initially, but maybe at some point it was just enough to get it to be a suggestion. Once it became a suggestion in Google Suggest, searcher's curiosity was piqued and so they clicked on it at a high rate. Google likely interpreted the large amount of clicks to mean that the phrase is a highly relevant suggestion, and as such moved it up to the top of the list of suggested terms.
Google's official statement on how Suggest works, from this blog post, is:
"As you type, Google's algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users' search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. All of the predicted queries shown have been typed previously by other Google users. The autocomplete dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries. In addition, if you're signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you may see search queries from relevant searches that you've done in the past."
We think there is quite a bit more to it than this. We recently read of a case study where a brand new domain had acquired a 'scam suggestion' from Google Suggest. It was evident that nobody had searched for this domain, let alone searched for the domain with the word 'scam'. What the domain owner found was that two scraper sites had scraped content from his site, and those two scraper sites had the word 'scam' buried in the URL. Based on this incident, we think it is very possible that content and associated words in Google's index may also influence the suggestions.
This SEOmoz Q&A by Dr. Pete is also about this very topic, and Dr. Pete believes it is possible that Google Suggest is biased to serve up the 'scam' suggestion, among others.
We kicked around the idea of working to influence Google Suggest to force out the ‘scam’ suggestion, and may revisit it down the road, but we decided that the fastest way to take action would be to push the negative content out of the SERPs with positive content that the client had complete control over. This way, when someone searched the scam phrase, they'd have to dig deep into the SERPs to find anything negative about the brand.
I know that you may be thinking that pushing bad results out of the SERPs feels a little dirty. I felt this way at first, however, after fully researching various approaches and processes we now believe firmly that it is indeed a Google sanctioned method. Our belief is based on this blog post from the Official Google Blog on how to get rid of negative brand rankings in the SERPs. In it, it states:
Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don't want them to see, you'll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.
Our Approach
We pitched the client, and subsequently implemented, a pretty ambitious plan. Our stated goal was to own 90% of the first two pages of Google results in 6 weeks. To control at least 18 positions, we knew we needed to focus on more than just 20 pieces of content. We decided that we would define 50 pieces of content, and as time went on, we'd determine which pieces of content Google was signaling that it liked (by slowly moving it up) and which it didn't. The content we focused on fell into two natural categories, Pre-Existing Content and New Content. The content for each of these categories was as follows:
Pre-Existing Content
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Subdomains on the client's website - The client had created two of these before we were brought in. They were subdomains setup that specifically addressed the false accusations.
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News articles - A benefit of the client being a big company is that they've already had plenty of mainstream press. We identified positive articles from Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and other Industry publications to promote for the scam phrase. We found that, even if the article didn't contain the word 'scam', anchor text alone, linking to these strong domains, could get them to rank for the scam phrase.
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Wikis - It seems that most industries and niches have their own wiki's. Our client had a page in a niche wiki, so we simply added the word 'scam' into the wiki in a natural way. Doing this, plus a few links, helped it rank for the scam phrase.
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Blog Posts - There were a number of positive blog posts about the company already online. The problem was, as I mentioned previously, that the comment sections of many of them were overrun with very negative comments (we could tell most of the comments were anonymous and contained inaccurate and fake information, likely from competitors). So, we chose to only promote blog posts that had disabled comments. Even if a blog post had no comments, we didn't use it if comments were open because they could always turn negative.
- Youtube - The client had created a few Youtube videos disputing the mis-information being spread about their business. Since YouTube allows for full content moderation, we found videos to be a great source of positive content that can be controlled.
New Content
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Content on the client's website - When the client originally tried to tackle this problem themselves, they had created a few posts on their blog that were optimized for the brand name + scam keyword. Since an official brand site is the most likely site to rank for any query containing the brand name, this was a smart move.
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Posts on sites we own - We have a fairly large number of blogs that we run as part of our business. Some of these blogs focus on the same industry as the client, so we simply created posts optimized for the scam keyword. Since these domains are aged and trusted, we knew it wasn't going to be too difficult to get them to rank.
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Article Directories - Squidoo, HubPages, eZineArticles, Buzzle, InfoMarketers, Go Articles, and many more - We have nice, old accounts on many sites like these, so we added new articles optimized for our term to them.
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Mini Blogs - We setup a number of mini-blogs on WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, and a few other WordPress MU sites we identified that we felt we'd be able to create a blog on that could rank.
- New Sites We Created -We bought the .com, .net, and .org versions of the exact match domains for the search phrase (including the word 'scam', eg. brandnamescam.com). We also bought hyphenated versions of the domain as well. We then setup mini-sites on different c-class IP addresses.
As you can see from the lists, our targets included a diverse set of content. The key was that there had to be some sort of control over the page. Either comments had to be turned off (to keep a positive article from becoming negative by a bunch of negative comments) or we needed to have control over the page/comment moderation to ensure we could control the message.
The general content on these pages included customer testimonials, positive stories, general information about the company, satisfaction guarantees, debunked mis-information, and other stories that either didn't pertain to the scam issue at all, or they showed positive aspects about the company. Is this a perfect strategy? No, I don't think so. But we believed that having 2 pages or SERPs with little information about an actual 'scam' is probably enough for most searchers to abandon the topic.
Link Building
After we had our content targets identified and/or created, we started the link building process. One thing I absolutely loved about getting some of these articles ranked was that it took almost no work to get something on page 1. Some of the positive pre-existing articles that we wanted to get on page 1 were on sites like the New York Post, so it basically took 2 lower-quality links with the exact anchor text 'brand name scam' to get it on page 1. It made me (briefly) dream about how easy a job it must be to do SEO for a site like The Wall Street Journal; you can practically rank #1 for any low-competition search term you want!
Our primary link building strategy was built around using article directories. We wrote hundreds of unique, quality articles (no spinning or machine generation) and submitted them to article directories, web 2.0 sites, blogs, and other sites that accepted our content. We varied our anchor text, and spread out the links across sites, and over time, so that the link profile was fairly natural.
Interlinking
We also wanted to interlink our sites in a way where they would all benefit, while avoiding obvious signals of 'link farms' or 2 or 3 way link exchanges. What we came up with is represented in the graph below. We've replaced the actual sites with S1, S2, etc, but this is the exact interlinking pattern we used. Sites that needed more help received more links, while some of the stronger sites only needed one or two links pointed at them.
Social Engineering
I also wanted to talk about another tactic we used to take on some of the more stubborn sites that just wouldn't seem to move out of the SERPs. In our case, these stubborn listings were two personal blogs. We heavily researched these blogs to understand the psyche of the authors. We then determined two separate strategies to pursue that would help us with our goal. In short, for one blog we made an offer to buy it outright. We didn't explain our background or why we wanted it (that is irrelevant to the buy/sell process), we just simply made an offer and began dialogue with the owner. In the second case, we talked to the webmaster and during discussions realized that the owner was not interested in the traffic received from the article, so we were able to work out a deal to help move the content out of the SERPs. We treaded very lightly with these tactics for two reasons: (1) We wanted our work to be legal and ethical, and (2) we needed to be very careful that these site owners didn't just create a new blog post talking about how our client was trying to 'buy their silence'.
Execution & Results
The results from our project were near-perfect. We obtained nine of the top ten results on page one, and all ten results on page two. We think that if we had more than just six weeks to complete this, we would have been able to get all 20 of the top 20, but 19 out of 20 wasn’t bad and our client was ecstatic.
I'd love to know your thoughts on how we approached this and what you would do differently. Based on the success we've had, we are looking to expand our offerings in this area. I personally loved the challenge of this and the interesting aspects of the problem.
Excellent post Brian and about a topic that here we read not so often.
Your case reminded of a similar one I had to to work on in the past, and - using tactics quite close to yours - we were able to push down almost all the negative results, mostly coming from blogs, forums and from site created exactly to spread negative info about the company.
What we used were microsites, one for each service of the client and each one with a blog in a subdomain. As in your case, the company had quite few good reviews from trusted specialized press... the shame that they were traditional offline pieces of good journalism; therefore we needed to act differently from you. We asked the permission to reproduce those good reviews and, with a classic co citation linking, we were linking to the source and viceversa. The links from the source where with optimized anchor texts.
Being this happened three years ago, we had not used nothing as Social Media to push up good reviews, but we used the Social of those "era", especially - due to the market of the client - all the technophile social sharing sites (e.g.: delicious, furl, mr. wong...)
Obviously, we too interlinked all the new sites, blogs and content on third party site, but I've to admit that your scheme is really a wonderful example of "architecture".
Again great post. I am so glad it was promoted.
Great case, I like the idea of creating a micro-site for each of their services. That is logical and doesn't look to suspicious.
Wow Brian. What a well written comprehensive post! I vote this gets promoted to the main blog straightaway.
It's a shame your target search results were the old style (ie 10 per page) That's one benefit of the heavily blended results. Fewer "blue links" to work with per page.
Thanks for sharing all this. And thanks for the interlinking example graph.
Agreed.. This is very helpful information and an interesting case study. I also vote it gets promoted to the SEOmoz Blog.
We identified positive articles from Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and other Industry publications to promote for the scam phrase. We found that, even if the article didn't contain the word 'scam', anchor text alone, linking to these strong domains, could get them to rank for the scam phrase.
It would seem the more your clients tried to obliterate the "scam blot" the worse things would get. Since bots gobble letter strings and the word "scam" appears on site (we don't scam you) that this would only strengthen the "scam" suggest by Google. It's like proving a negative, i.e., there are no blue giraffes. When an SE user enters blue giraffes in to the search box, the reference to blue giraffes would just appear more frequently or higher in the suggest list.
Your tactics prove that you can manipulate the machine and that bots are dumber than a box of rocks. Congratulations. There are a lot of take-aways in this post.
Thanks for sharing, though it does sound like a lot of work. Hope you got paid a big pile of cash for the effort.
Paul
Hey Paul, thanks for the comment. You are right, we did identify pretty early on that we were probably going to indeed strengthen the 'scam' suggestion. Rather than trying to manipulate 'Google Suggest', we chose to manipulate the results for the suggestion. We do have some ideas for manipulating suggest, especially using Amazon's mechanical turk, but we thought we could get the quickest and most certain results using tried & true SEO.
The amount of work (kicking a dead horse) to move ANY term out of google suggest is staggering. That would mean having thousands of people at your disposal searching terms related to the company and not "Brand Name Scam", all the while maintaining your ethics. Kudos to you and your firm for some good old fashioned out of the box thinking. You delivered significant value to your client, and have taught us all a pretty important lesson, not to mention the time savings associated with your research.
Thank you very much for your post, I look forward to following your other writing.
We've had the same issues come up and came to the same natural conclusion, own the SERP instead of trying to get rid of it. It was much easier to do and much more cost effective.
We had the same discussion about m.turks or mircoworkers helping mold the SERPs and realized how costly it could be for an uncertain result. Also think outside the box, like making a viral video. If it catches on and the brand name is associated it could dominate the SERPs for the brand name. Also try to get 'review' or 'reviews' higher, or if there are multiple locations push advertising with location specifics. i.e. company + city. The more you advertise these phrases the more consumers will be likely to type them into google.
It could be much more work trying to move "scam" out of the suggest. You would need to increase all of the other suggests over the scam suggest. Basically, you can end up doing 9 times the work to strengthen all of the other suggests over the scam suggest.Look at the IM industry. Almost every product has "scam" in the second suggestion but if you look at the results you would need to go deep in the searches to find a bad review. It is just loaded with affiliate pages with stuff like "brand name scam? no way! buy it!".
It is much easier to focus on pushing down any bad reviews and let other suggests naturally work their way up (as long as the client does not have many issues in this area).
One thing you can do is use micanical terk and build a brandreview.com and get that high high enough where people can find it.. once you know where it is then have real people search for brand review and stay on your brandreview.com from their own search.
then once people start searching brand( space ) we will outrank scam with review. :)
Absolutely fascinating and well worth the read! Thanks. Gave you a thumbs up before I even finished the post and would have given you 2 if I could have.
Thank you very much for this great post. It's the most informative post on seomoz I've seen in months. I bet it will be posted on the official blog real soon.
We have done many of these style removals in the last several months. One really big help was simply buying the .net and .org's for the clients name or brand name along with the "scam" in it. They were exceptionally easy to get ranked.
One thing that people need to be extremely careful about is who they use for reputation management. I have seen companies who use black hat hackers out in Romania that end up paying more after the negatives are replaced than when they were their. The last thing a company wants to end up with is being held hostage by people who know they will pay to keep their reputation clean. If the service used has this knowledge and is unethical, you can end up in a real pickle. Great post.
Excellent comment. I'd highly recommend any company hiring someone to do this type of thing for them to require a non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement that has some type of ramification if broken. You certainly don't want an enterprising news reporter to discover the work being done to bury dissent and spin it up into some really bad press.
Here is an important point!!!!!
A non disclosure agreement is only worth something if you have the ability to enforce it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Don't expect a whole lot of value out of a non-disclosure agreement signed by a small development firm in India. How do you plan on enforcing this? Unless you also have a lawyer in India that would file a local suit, you are up S*it creek with no paddle. Start by working with someone you are pretty sure will never require a non disclosure agreement, or someone you can enforce it on.
Uh oh - my Q&A are being quoted now? That's going to mean trouble ;)
I missed this last week - really interesting case study. I think you're right - the Suggest algorithm factors in a lot more than just query volume or, at the very least, is associating related queries somehow. Otherwise, you'd have a self-perpetuating system where people just keep searching for what's suggested and the suggestions never change.
As someone who does a good deal of ORM, I think your article is impressive.
In these types of situations, I usually find other words, like "[branded term] offer," and build a content ring around that set of keywords. You do this enough, you can push down "scam." That being said, I really like your approach.
Nice idea around building up 'offer', I like that. Thanks for the tip
Nicely outlined roadmap here. Enjoyed reading your reasoning behind each step. 19 out of 20 positions is definitely nothing to feel defeated over :)
Very Interesting. Thanks for sharing how you responded to a Brand issue. I'll admit I'm surprised at how often Google suggestions the word Scam for businesses. It appears that it doesn't even matter how reputable your brand it.
I know they lost a lawsuit in the past related to this issue (https://searchengineland.com/google-loses-french-lawsuit-over-google-suggest-32994) but I guess that's limitted to just that individual business.
Thats good for the SEO's handling rep management in France, but here in the US what are we to do. Besides I am sure the legal costs associated with fighting Google far outweigh what Brian has suggested here.
Yeah, unfortunately I don't think the precedence set in this case would be useful in bringing suit anywhere else outside of France. To bring Google to trial over this, especially with no clear precedence, would require an immense amount of resources. I would love to see someone with the resources do it, though! Direct Buy, who was my example case in the article, would have the resources to do this (I think).
Wow, what a wonderful post. I'm doing my first batch of reputation management for a client, and this post really helped me get an actionable plan out quickly.
Thanks Brian!
First I have to say that this post was right on target and got my creative juices flowing. In addition, allot of the comments were full of great information.
I have being SEO for a long time now. Recently I took on a reputation management project for a client. It was an eye opening experience. I created a Web of blogs and Web 2.0 properties and then promoted them. They had a profound effect on the SERPs on the 1st page. I like that you suggest Wordpress MU sites. It shows me you know your SEO stuff. However many of those sites do not stick. I am sure you will agree. They bounce around in the SERPs allot with Google's dance and many of the links are habitually broken. There are lots of ways to do this with the basic same results. Now with Google's new algo it will be more difficult but not impossible. Simple massive link building will not work now as it did in the past. A more sophisticated Social Network is needed nowadays to push negative content on to the 3rd and 4th pages of Google.
The good thing is that this kind of approach has two positive results. First it pushes the negative results off the 1st page. Secondly, it promotes traffic for the main website. For example, www.widgets.com has some negative content. You create a Hubpage, Squidoo Lens and add a .com site on Wordpress.com to name but a few. Those blogs/sites represent the company and can in themselves drive traffic to the main website. It's a win win situation. I turn over these sites and properties to my clients at the end of our contract. The client can continue to promote add content to these sites for as long as he/she wishes. If done correctly, he/she could dominate the 1st page with all 10 results!
You also need to take advantage of Youtube which is the 2nd most popular search engine in the world just after Google. In addition, Google has made Youtube.com a dofollow website. Make sure to insert the URL for your Youtube video in all your properties.
Stay away from Twitter if you are not that familiar with it. You don't need negative results showing up there and having it in the #1 position on the 1st page. Unless you can streamline it to show only isolated comments. If you can do this, link it to Facebook and Linkedin. Those three authoritative sites if harnessed promoted correctly can garner the fist three positions in the SERPs easily.
Honestly, the key with building Web 2.0 properties to push negative content into the backpages of the SERPs is building them from within. You can actually develop a Hubpage into a PR3 quite easily just by promoting it from within it own community. Doing this means that the Web 2.0 properties you utilize have longevity. Open an account in Hubpages for the keyword scam in the companies name. Then create other Hubs under that account. If you can't get one with "scam" try "scammers." Promote with other Hubbers. Think community!
I found it very insightful that you use the scam keyword in your anchor text for your main site and other properties. I never thought of that. Thanks so much for sharing that very important bit of information. And thanks to everyone who took the time to add your experiences here.
As someone who does a good deal of ORM, I think your article is impressive.
In these types of situations, I usually find other words, like "[branded term] offer," and build a content ring around that set of keywords. You do this enough, you can push down "scam." That being said, I really like your approach.
What a great article! I think, in an ideal world and given more time, you would want to combine two strategies - using both the 'scam' keyword and also using 'offer' in conjunction with the brand name. Obviously, all of this takes more time and effort. Awesome article though - thanks.
Absolutely. Given a larger budget and more time, We'd optimize for 'scam' while also targeting 'offer' and other words to eventually push 'scam' out of Google Suggest.
Great post! It looks like you put a lot of thought and effort into it, with good results.
Thank you! It was a methodical approach and we were very happy with the results. I think the more you try to approach a problem like this with your thinking hat on, to come up with unique or clever strategies, the more likely an overwhelming success the project will be.
What a great post. Our customers don't find the word "Scam", but we do see "complaints" appear, and we can start using these marketing techniques to help promote the positives.
Complaints would be another bad one that we would try to fight. Not as bad as 'scam' which I think has a really bad connotation, but close. If you have time to solve the problem, you may also want to toy with influencing Google Suggest as others have stated.
I highly recommend grabbing *Yourcompanyname*complaints.com and *Namescam.com*
Ever seen a pissed off consumer who knows how to use wordpress and godaddy? I have, perfect case of ounce of prevention being worth a ton of cure.
Yes, that certainly wouldn't hurt. Might not be a bad idea to setup a simple site on them just to get it indexed.... not to get it ranked or anything, but just incase you need them in the future, they'll at least have some nice age on them.
Thanks SEOMoz for quoting my Q&A in the article. I wanted to update everyone. We, while still optimizing our Positive SERPs, we have about 16 on Pages 1, 2 and 3. We DID successfully impact Google Suggest!! We have not removed "SCAM" but we did get "BRAND NAME" + "TRUTH" to leapfrog SCAM. This is seen as a huge win and step in the right direction. We did it using the methods mentioned in these comments, but it TOOK time. Like 45 days minimum to see Google Suggest change.
One question, I wonder if you "change your location" on google, and perform a search, does that impact the "regional" Google Suggest? Just a small thought on tweaking our reputation management process for Google Suggest.
It is just ridiculously easy to sabotage your competition this way. Google needs to step up and do something about it. All it takes is to search for "Competitor Scam" on an industry blog's site, get the search page indexed, and then post up a tag page with "competitor scam" on a few blogger.com and wordpress.com sites, maybe Squidoo, hire some Mechanical Turk people to get the ball rolling by searching for "competitor scam" and then it just takes on a life of its own.I don't post this to give anyone ideas, just to express my frustration at how easy it is. Is anyone from Google paying attention to this? For crying out loud, it is Google Bombing all over again!
indeed Google Bombing has gone from the lighthearted 'talentless hack' prank to something that could legitimately put good companies out of bussiness. Sure, there are bad companies that deserve the scam designation. But there are many good companies that do not deserve it, but have to deal with it nonetheless.
Nice case study on this Brian.
Just out of curiousity, have you seen a spike in rep management requests lately?
This past year I have handled 3 of these type of cases and I keep getting more and more requests to do so. In fact I have had more requests in the last 3 months to do this than I have in the past 3 years prior.
Hi Peter, I haven't seen an increased demand yet, but I have definitely seen more and more cases of this problem (and similar instances). Hopefully our success with this leads to more business as I definitely enjoyed this project. It allowed us to come up with some unique strategies and ideas, and its really fun to point links at giant news sites and see them jump to page #1 almost overnight.
Great post, I have found that using and promoting web 2.0 websites with quality content tends to rank well and pushes down the unfriendly content relatively quickly
Amazing. You cannot possibly imagine how useful this article has been. :) Especially appreciate the news article tip - why not take advantage of positive content on strong sites? Thanks!!
Yes, those new articles are surprisingly easy to move in the SERPs with just a few links. The fun part is, for me anyway, that you don't have to be too careful 'overdoing' it with the anchor text. They are a huge news site, so Google doesn't care if it gets 5+ links to it all with the exact same anchor text.
Right - I was concerned about us "overdoing it" with anchor text, so your suggestion makes a lot of sense.
Promote this to the main blog! Great post!
In my experience , Fighting with "BrandName+Hate" & "BrandName+Love" Query was very very hard.
I had one client come to me with a huge problem surrounding Google where 8 out of the 10 listings on Google for their brand term's were all negative. The problem was that some of these sites were news paper websites with alexa above 200 so it was very tricky to out rank them but seeing as the brand term recieved around 5000 exact searches a month it was a well rewarded project in the end after we developed a full scale strategy and implemented it over 12 months.
Nice work - I'm sure it was tough to knock out those big-time sites, but with that much traffic it seems necessary to protect the brand reputation.
Yep that's when you hit the real work, when you're facing negative pages from real high authority domains. The 1st port of call would be to try and undo the external links to the page e.g. Pay bloggers to remove their links. You could also try and remove the internal links to the page e.g. Wikipedia - try and edit the internal links to point at more beneficial pages to the user.
Great tips! I never thought about paying people to remove links... brilliant for lots of different SEO needs!
This case we were presented with a high authority news site had a very negative image on our client. They made something like 20 different articles on the big news website (top 200 alexa) all with the brand terms in the title, 20x in the body text all highly optimized CMS. The problem with big news sites is many smaller sites instantly copy the content for blogs, this then creates more back links. This problem was not only limited to the Google search algo we also faced problems with Google news so we had to set up a separate strategy for that which involved SEO web PR and then also we faced more problems with specific clients in the articles started to face a spider web of negative articles for their names. Sure paying people to remove links may work but some of these sites already have so much money they do not want to remove links. But yeah Brand Reputation Management SEO is something I have been highly involved with for the last 2 years, it is one of the most challenging areas of SEO imo.
Awesome Strategy Brian,
Really, reputation of a brand is something that is crucial not only to the company but also to the agencies who are handling them. One negative feedback may ruin all the personality of a brand. I'm also doing seo of some high brand company to which I've to keep upto date info. Though, they still didn't get any negative feedback (hoping to be like it) but also very few positive response. One thing I came to know from their analytics that users are not only searching with their brand names but also with "brand name reviews" "brand name complaint" "brand name scam"as local seo is being popularly recognized by many to know the loopholes of the company.
Will try your approach towards eradicating negative response of ones brand.
Thanks.
Yeah, I think people are catching on that if you want to find out if a company has any dirty laundry, you amend your search of their brand name to include things like scam, fraud, complaints, reviews, etc. Unfortunately SERPs like these can hurt really good brands if they have just 1 upset customer who decided to take their issue to the interwebs.
I think its near impossible to ensure 100% happiness once your business scales. No matter how great a company, someone can get wronged. Taking control over the SERPS for 'scam' or 'complaints' so that you can control the message of your brand is imperative for ORM.
Good material. Is going to come in handy when I run into a similar issue with my clients in the future. Thanks for sharing.
great article and I am at this very minute implementing a similar strategy for a client, great timing.
This is a fantastic post by Marty Weintraub on Brand Management using Google Alerts to manage everything from brands to personnel to spam. It takes a heckuva long time to set up but has been well worth it.
Ah you let that secret out of the bag lol.
Has any one discovered or researched whether or not disabling the ablity for visitors to comment, on a blog post or a piece of content, affect the amount of authority or relevance that the search engine will give it. Obviously it would be more wise to be able to screen al comments before allowing them to show up on your post, but for platforms that do not offer it would you think it would be better to have a mix positive and potentially negative comments. Also what are your thoughts on counter-comments to negative comments. For example if someone comments on a brand's blog post but a faithful consumer comes back and basically disproves the negative comment. Do ou think that has any affect on SEO?
Thanks for the Post! Keep rockin'!
Personally I do not believe that negative or positive comments have any bearing on Googles's algo. What is important is leaving all kinds of comments from spammers. Delete the spam whenever you can.
I like the idea of promoting other blog posts and good news articles from trusted sources. These seem like a great way to get unbiased information on the first page. I think this is key in good reputation management instead of just flooding the first page with web 2.0 properties or subdomains. Both are needed but it's always nice when searching on a company to see articles from a trusted news site.
Thank you! This is a great blog article with helpful information. I didn't realize before how this new normal of scamming can have such a powerful negative effect on my online reputation without me even knowing it. Thanks for diving into the complicated, clandestine world of online analytics. You've shared helpful tips to improve our knowledge of how layers of keywords affect our online rankings. I know now, better than before how every word I use and every sentence I structure for my business is critical to upholding a professional internet presence. Knowledge is power and this information will help me recognize what to watch for in the future. Keep up the research and good work. I'm going to stay on top of this topic... my reputation depends on it.
One's online reputation can have as much of an impact on their life as their real world reputation these days. All too often, people do not know what their reputation online even is. This is unfortunate since it is in fact so heavy on impact. First, one must look at what is already available online about them. This means all of their social media profiles, their blog posts, and anything that someone else has written about them. All of these things impact how one is seen online. Therefore, the online reputation management game starts with cleaning these up. After the old things have been examined, the new ones can start to be reviewed. People have to consider everything that they put online will essentially remain there forever. Always think about that before posting anything. You may regret those choices in the future.
This has been really helpful, trying to help someone who has had some negative P.R based on a misunderstanding. Will see how we fare.
In 6 weeks you said? What are you - ggl God ;)
Excellent article and some of the techniques have really been useful in my quest to push some negative links for my client. However, its been a challenge to push negative News links in Google SERPs. Most often I have failed when working on ORM projects for clients which have authoritative negative news links. Any suggestion for the same would be of great help.
If you get positive customer reviews on multiple review sites for a local business, there is a very good chance Google will show that business name as a representative of that review site. Look up "appliance repair 33967" and notice that Posetek Appliance shows up at least four times on 3 different review websites. This is a relatively simple way to start dominating the first page of results quickly with a 5-star reputation. This would not work for a national brand however.
From all the reputation management campaigns I have executed:
Happy to see such a post on youmoz. Great work ! :)
This is the best article,I have come across in the subject.The author has clearly spoken out his techniques,unlike many other articles on the subject - which only talked about the problem,not the solution.
For a small business owner like me,it has taken away my bread and butter.
All I knew was just this simple business - in a very narrow segment.I did it well and the customers where all just online users.In a segment which is very location specific,heavy competition and reputation is highly important,just think about google suggesting <mycompany complaints> in first position.
Reason being mycompany is been proactively indexed in some complaint websites(for them to recive hits),The funny part is even though mycompany complains is suggested for last over 4 months,There is not even a single complaint registered.But how long?
I am pretty sure every potential customer,would have clicked through this suggestion and the CTR keeps increasing,making this the most popular search.(even suggesting complaingts is enough - to move away the customer in this field)
I have seen many other similar companies in the same segment also,my competitors (with very good name) showing up also with <company name complaints>.
One point is clear,This is a real serious issue - In the real world ,will any one allow to keep a complaint board in from of your office,Will google president allow me to keep a complaint board in front of his office,where dissatisfied customers can go and write there complaints.
Or will google suggest even suggest <google scam> or <google complaints> when customer searh for google,the day when some google scam comes out.(wont they filter it out)
The real problem is ,does google has common sense that,it is always negative phrases what humans are more interested,it doesnt even require a suggestion and once suggested ,negative + negative ,wont every thing negative comes up first in google suggest in next few years.for every small company(or in some segments,where the volume is less)
Billion,billion companies like google -- can do what ever they want,and preach moral to general public like u and me,Who even find it a taboo subject to talk upon.
Its a pity that google big shots,even after understanding the real problem -is not ready to listen,because they have grown big,they have no time to listen or understand the poor.
I am seeing many people ,who has shut down there business,thanks to google.All there curses will bring google down.
Your article talks about the work around for the issue.You even consider it a taboo subject to increase the positive search terms(mechanically),but is it really taboo?
,to deal negative with negative (taking a thorn with a thorn)though google preaches us not to do?
Please some one suggest the steps,tools etc or a full fledged article on how to remove scam,complaints etc out of google suggest (taking thorn with thorn approach,not hiding with your blanket,and be proud of it)
BTW I am not very technical.
The worst part is, many business take a silent death,rather than fighting a case with google.
In a country like India ,where I live -It may take a life time effort and my whole ancesstoral wealth and all the wealth which ,I am going to earn to fight a case with google.The result of which may come after my life.
But in a country like US,UK etc,atleast some one should have taken this case with google.
Will any one do that,You have a good case to win and earn.I am sure.
Just as google understand the importance of its business(.How many dirty tricks it adapts to kill its own competition),Atleast allow other businesses to live.
"Live and let live" - simple suggestion for google
Or if google still,want to act like a saviour of cusomer,acting as if they want to save the customer-FIne let them do it with moderation by humans.
Google suggest with moderation -- A durbar set up by giant google in which cutomer and business owner fight there case ,based on which google suggest.
Im ,I right ?
Leaving the job to robots,and google bosses counting money in there cabins is not good.
Needless to say google adsense earn heavily in all these review website(The customer do not even want to miss any single ad also on these sites-because the customers money is in stake),
Google if it has to remove these suggestions,will definitely loose many billions,because the customer straight away go to the business website,where there are no ads ,and google looses ..
Is all about money honey for google
That's an excellent post on reputation management, one that I'm grappling with right now. I have a solution for addressing the Google suggest, that may succeed...
Assuming that Google suggest is based on intent keywords (the keyword that the user types), this is what I propos.
When a user searches for a generic set of keywords that belong to the brand, we pull him to a Google ad. Once he has clicked through to the landing page, we can provide a list of links pointing to a Google query with the keyword phrases in it.
For e.g. https://www.google.com/?q=Ajax%20brand or https://www.google.com/?q=Ajax%20information etc.
Over a period of time, the keywords embedded in the query will be called more often and overshadow the controversial/unwelcome keyword phrase.
What do you think?
Arun
I'd have to agree that the end goal should have been to remove the word scam from search suggestion, not reinforce it. I'm not sure I understand the end game here. I get that we want to push negative results down, but since predicted search suggest isn't an option, shouldn't removal have been the priority? The longer it exists in the suggest, the higher the CTR will grow. Just my two cents away. Overall, excellent article on linking to high PR content to push low PR garbage off the first two pages. Keep up the great work!
Good point. The primary objective with companies, especially new ones should be to protect it's online reputation. And, the sooner this is done the better.
6 weeks?! Bravo.
Thanks! In retrospect, I would have liked to have taken a bit more time... but like everything, this was "urgent".
After the initial X weeks to get a project like this done, its imperative to continue with a maintenance plan/strategy to ensure that the negative content doesn't slip back onto page 1 or 2.
Great post! I have just finished a job like yours for a client et one thing is very important: Do you exactly know how your client is working? Sometimes, the problem is inside the client's company and changes need come from the core. But doing a amazing work like yours on the SERPs is also important!
Yes - this is important to us. We aren't willing to do this type of work for a company that truly is a scam or fraudulent. I have no ethical hangups doing this for a company that offers a real, fair product but just has a few unhappy customers. I have a big problem with helping out scams, no matter how much they are willing to pay.
This is some of the most actionable reputation management advice I've read anywhere. Kudos Brian. I def agree that Google seems to be encouraging proactive rep management posting, submitting and social profile creating to protect yourself.
Agreed. If I was any other large brand, I'd take actions similar to these *before* ending up with a 'scam' SERP. The more aged content out there, the better. Then, when you need it, you can just make some few tweaks to include the word 'scam' and start pointing some links at them.
Thanks so much for sharing this. I was also glad to hear that your interlinking worked out on all those sites. That seems to be a great strategy in dominating the search results.
Great post. I skipped over the fact that direct buy wasn't your client and did a search for them to see only terrible results. I re-read to realize that wasn't your client.
Perfect strategies for ORM.
Haha, yeah, Direct Buy definitely still needs someone to do this for them. They should hire us :)
Great post. I've never thought about the tactic "if you can't beat them join and clean them" ];)
I have not had to battle the 'scam' problem that your client is facing but my reputation management clients do have to deal with another head on the monster. If it's not the horrible and unethical rip-off site, it's the complaint site. Like your client, our clients are legitimate and offer a valuable product/services. It's a shame that the one or two negative reviews on the sites mentioned get so much weight. Why should two unhappy customers out of thousands of happy ones get heard so easily?
When I worked at a restaurant/hotel we gave out comment cards. The majority of people would not fill them out but those that did, 50-75% of them were negative reviews. I'm a strong believer that anger and disappointment is a stronger motivating factor than joy and satisfaction. In regards to the negative comments, we would try new things to avoid repeating whatever it was that upset the guest. Other than word of mouth, the comment cards a negative words would eventually disappeared. - but not today - the Internet keeps a record of everything for a long long time.
Your next test should be based on what the best strategy is to get people to give positive reviews. - to help water down the bad ones. coupons, discounts, free cake, free hat...!
I think your observation is right on - few things seem to motivate people more than the feeling of being wronged. This vocal minority can cause reputation management issues that are a pain to deal with.
I agree, and this observation has been... well, observed... many times.
When people are completely satisfied by a product or service they have received they usually resign themselves to a mental state of complacence. They will almost never talk about the satisfaction they were given by the subject, unless someone in their immediate life brings up the topic or is looking for feedback on it.
Counter to this - if a person feels like they have been wronged (whether fairly or not) part of the coping mechanism we humans have is to outwardly express our views on the matter. Anger and negative emotions are very strong 'right now' motivators.
This is why it isn't uncommon for a business to find they have an overall negative online review presence if they have not been keeping up with things. I'm sure we've all had to advise businesses to actively encourage their customers to post a review on Google Places, or Yelp, or wherever. We know, if only subconsciously, that all the clients who have had a good experience with the subject business need a little external motivation to spread the word about their story - whereas the minority with the bad experiences have all the internal motivation to yell about it high on the mountain... even to that random guy walking by in the yellow shirt who otherwise couldn't care less.
well said!
Hey Brian, thanks for sharing. Defintely 'food for thought' and I'm hoping will help us with a strategy for one of our clients. Thanks again
This is a great post! The auto suggest "brand name + scam" is an issue a lot of companies face, this is a good resource. As you showed, this takes a good amount of work but the payoff is pretty significant, I'm guessing.
Do you guys have plans to try and get "brand name scam" out of auto suggest? I would think this would be huge as many people probably wouldn't think to search this. Further, I would guess that even if the results are all positive, there is a certain amount of distrust inherently built by the suggestion that needs to be overcome.
Again, nice post.
Hey Geoff, you are spot on that the mere fact that 'brand + scam' is the second suggestion for this brand name is a negative signal in a potential customers mind. So, aside from getting it out of Google Suggest all together, what we did was the next best thing.
We've toyed with different ideas around modifying Google Suggest, but it isn't something we've explored deeply. Our likely strategy would be something like this:
1. Identify the search terms that we want to outrank the 'scam' term. We'd likely want to identify a bunch of these. Our primary source for the keywords would be all of the other positive terms that Google is already suggesting.
2. We'd use Amazon's Mechanical Turk and have people around the United States (or whatever country the problem is occurring in) search the terms. To verify that they have done it, I'd have the people doing that task list the first result from the search. I'd probably spread these searches out over a few months, with consisten volume each day.
3. We'd create content that uses those keywords. Press releases, articles, blog posts, etc. As noted in the article, we think that Google suggest is influenced by both people searching terms and also content that it indexes.
Even with all this work, as Dr. Pete stated, Google could very well be biased to display the 'scam' keyword, which would make all of this effort for not. But, if you aren't trying to eliminate a scam term, I think the above steps are solid for influencing Google Suggest. White hat? Maybe not....
I don't think you could do it manually, but it IS possible with automation.
I had actually almost done something almost exactly like that in the past. Ended up doing it as there is no concrete research on it and they didn't want to be the guinea pig. That said, it's a really interesting topic that hasn't been explored. Mechanical Turk, Odesk and eLance were all sources that I looked at using.
Good luck, I'm glad you had such great success cleaning up the first couple pages.
Fantastic post. There has certainly been an increase in demand for reputation management services, in my opinion and competent handling of campaigns like we see in this example are a credit to our industry.
Great Work!
Excellent read, thanks for documenting the case study. Will definitely keep this one on hand as a future reference.
this is really awesome and exellent post. i really picked the many point here . i will say you done absolutly the best.
[link removed]
Bravo! This is an excllent post and I will keep it around in the event I need such strategies.
thank you very much
Did you check Google keyword tool to see about how many people actually searched this brand + scam? I bet it was low. I appreciate all the work it must have taken but dang, thats sounds like a high budget project for the company to deal with a small problem if they indeed are a legit company that cares about customer service. I would think the better course could have been to put out the existing fires out there. This company isn't owned by certain ex-microsoft, ex-billionaire would it. I ran across a company several times recently that was clearly conducting a similar brand management exercise - creating several personal sites for the CEO, link building to old big name press articles, and even his Forbe billionaire page from the bubble era. It was pretty interesting to say the least.
We ran an AdWords campaign on the scam keyword, so we knew how many times the scam phrase was searched - it was significant. The AdWords tool traffic estimate significantly underreported how many times this was actually being searched (no surprise).
And no, I don't think the client is the person/company you are alluding to.
I am wondering how close this stat was with Google Alerts?
I would love to see some of this information. I would love to run the site through Yahoo Site Explorer and see some of their links.
Great post!
Hi Brian, Very nice post.
What do you think on this, for example i have 6 branded websites.
brand-jobs.com / brand-tourism.com / brand.com / blog.brand.com / etc ..
all this pages are well optimized on page for a " brandnamekeyword " all are on different ip-s and all have unique backlinks.
Do you think its not danger to lose completely brand if i link one with another ( interlinking ) if google penalize one of them, than its possible to lose completely SERP of my brand name.
WHat do you think, its danger or not ?
THanks,
I would be really careful about interlinking them in any sort of deceptive manner. I think it would be normal for them to all link to eachother since it is all the same brand and sites you manage together. I mean, a normal website links to their job section and their services - so if this information is kept on separate domains, that doesn't mean you couldn't link them together.
I like to play it safe, though, so I would likely not overthink or go overboard with the interlinking. Just do what is natural. In terms of what provides the most value... brand.com likely has the most trust/authority, so I'd want that one to definitely link to the others if it was natural.
I am curious why you want to link these together? You won't get any real Google juice doing this. What is your purpose?
Thank you for the great article Brian. Today was the first time I read seomoz.org Yours was the first article. Wow - I will definitely be back for more reading. The idea of reputation management is something we have always kept in mind but never really put a label on it. So many companies seem to want to show you how to get 20,000 links a year with disregard to how your website looks in the end. Your project was an eye opener regarding inviting negative feedback. I guess you have to consider however that people do like to complain and tell you more about what went wrong today instead of what went right. I guess with that in mind, we have to balance feedback, which is likely to be negative vs. damaging our online reputation. A little off the subject but some what related: I heard a funny but true story about a recently appointed CEO who announced on the first day that he would be handling all complaints personally. A company who normally received a lot of complaints per day started receiving very few after only a week. Employees became a little more consensus when they figured the new boss would hear about it and it would be a negative reflection on them.
I'm glad my article was the first you read at SEOmoz and that it didn't scare you away :) You'll love it here, the tools and community are unbelievable!
This is great stuff. We are currently in the process of developing a strategy for one of our largest clients with a lot of bad reviews on pissedconsumer and complaintsboard. I will definitley be using these suggestions. Thanks for posting!
I'm glad it could help. Do let us know if you have any questions!
What is the advantage of setting up minisites specifically on c-class ip addresses?
Hi, here is a good Q&A on SEOmoz that details why different c-class IP addresses is important. https://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/1558
Burying the content was predictable and effective strategy. Im really impressed with the results you guys got. wow. Also, the social engineering bit, sooo unethical, but who cares, you guys did great.
You are right. It is somewhat unethical. I was actually quite surprised - despite them being able to provide remarkable results - that they would engage in such an activity. Especially since Rand has always been against spamming on the internet and them being readers & contributors of SEOMOZ. To go as far as using mini nodes to take the first two pages of Google hostage; doesn't sound like them at all. I think the more ethical thing to have done would have been to flushed out the Google suggest.
great article and I am at this very minute implementing a similar strategy for a client, great timing.
Mechanical Terk and BrandReview.com won't provide the solution, unfortunately you need to localize the search traffic since Google Instant targets geographical search trends.
However....
I have successfully created a solution to the Google Suggest negative suggestions issue. I can fully remove any trace of "scam", "rip-off", "complaints" etc.
Contact me for details, [email protected]
great article and I am at this very minute implementing a similar strategy for a client, great timing.
I just want to thank you all guys for sharing the topic and your insights by commenting on this.
It's just so hard for someone to find more about Rep Management as no one is sharing such techniques for obvious reasons!
Also check my try on the topic : https://seoinlondon.com/reputation-management/
Very cool. Thanks for the detail. I've worked on a couple of big-company rep managment before, and we did some of the things you mentioned, but there are some here that we didn't think of! It's helpful that the company was willing to "confront" the accusations head on through videos and articles. Great post!
Yes, it was definitely helpful that they were willing to host and create content. The videos were really effective in getting ranked, and they did a great job of dispelling the false information being spread.
I have question regarding article marketing. I am working on eCommerce website. [Spider Office Chairs] I have submitted 22 unique articles over 150+ free article directories. 50% articles are approved & indexed by Google. But, I am not satisfy with this activity. Is it advisable to submit one article to various 150 free article directories? I am thinking to develop unique article on each directory & approach to get good page rank for each approved article. Will it work better for me or not? This is just my mind bubble. But, I am thinking that, this is right post to put my question over here. BTW: Thanks for your valuable post.