Last week I visited Milan, Italy thanks to the generosity of the US State Department and Marco Montemagno, organizer of Social Media Week. I was, first off, impressed that the State Dept. had a formal program to encourage digital entrepreneurship and the promotion of Internet use as part of their mission to spread democracy. I was even more impressed that Marco's Social Media Week garnered more than 25,000 attendees (granted, most events were free, but still exciting numbers).
During my participation in the event and in private meetings with several folks from local businesses and government offices, I was surprised at how many times the issue of SEO for reputation management arose. Perhaps Italians on the web are given to sparking controversy or perhaps it's merely coincidence, but either way, I promised to write a post describing some of the most powerful methods we've observed for driving down negative or unwanted results in Google and controlling one's own listings.
The following are my (more advanced) suggestions to anyone seeking to "own" their SERPs in the engines:
#1: Cultivate the Right Social Profiles in the Right Ways
A big mistake many in the reputation management field make is to register social profiles at dozens or hundreds of sites and point links to as many as possible, hoping that some will take over those top rankings. This actually dilutes the effectiveness of the strategy, as those links could be consolidated across a few powerful profiles instead, often with much greater effect. The general sites I recommend include (in order of profile effectiveness):
That said, another big mistake is presuming that just registering a profile is enough to take over the rankings. My experience has been that participating heavily in the sites (for example, on Flickr, uploading lots of photos and sets, making lots of friends, getting others to comment on your photos, etc) can be more valuable to help those profiles rank than just earning external links. This is why if you're passionate and active on a community like DeviantArt, Quora, Armor Games or another niche social site, those can outrank even the big guns of the social world. Regular, authentic partcipation is key.
Some additional rules to remember with social profiles include:
- Name your profiles correctly. If possible, don't use pseudonyms, but rather your full first and last name (or brand name) either as a single word or with hyphens
- Fill out the profiles completely - photos, bio, videos, links, topics, tags - whatever the platfrom offers, take advantage of it fully.
- Leverage your address book or a list of your social media active contacts - friend/follow/connect with them on each of the platforms.
- Make new connections on each platform, too. Use OSE's top pages tab to find the most linked-to URLs on the social platforms and see if you can comment, connect or otherwise get your profile linked-to from those pages.
- Don't forget about relevance - if the page looks unnatural or keyword-stuffed, you risk having the profile banned by the admins of the site and jeopardize your ability to authentically participate and make connections with other people, brands and content.
Like everything else in life - nothing worth having comes easy. Invest in your social profiles and they'll reward you with controllable front-page real estate in the rankings.
#2: Author a Universal Bio with Embedded Links
If you or your company appear in press, media, at events or even receive mentions and references on the web, there's almost always a stock "bio" or "profile" that's requested by the publisher. This stock paragraph is a remarkable opportunity to link to your various pages on the web in relevant, appropriate ways. For example, let's say I'm crafting a stock profile for SEOmoz to be used whenever we're a sponsor, participant or reference-source in an event/media piece). I'd go with something like:
SEOmoz is a Seattle based software startup focused on making SEO (Search Engine Optimization) easy and accessible to all marketers. The company's popular SEO blog serves more than 80K daily subscribers, while their SEOmoz twitter and Facebook accounts interact with thousands more in the social world. For more about SEOmoz, see funding + investors via Crunchbase and job opportunities on LinkedIn.
Notice the multiple links with reasonably good anchor text pointing back to pages we control on the web? This works reasonably well for companies, but is even more effective for individuals, as these "bios" tend to follow you everywhere in your professional/public life. Be sure to follow up when you send these to press outlets, places you're advertising or events you participate in/sponsor to make sure the links are included. 50% of the time or more, you'll need to send a reminder email to make sure they're properly attributing.
#3: Speak, Invest, Donate & Hire
These four tactics are the most effective ways I've seen to get your brand/bio/links propogated across the web. Speaking at events is typically free (other than travel), promotes yourself and your brand, and almost always carries a high quality bio with links. Investing in companies or donating to non-profits or even individuals is similarly effective and can save the travel/pitching/Powerpoint. Even small amounts carry recognition from powerful pages, press releases and media articles to help boost your links.
Hiring is unique, because the ads are often temporary. However, many sources for job ads will maintain a permanent profile so long as you regularly or intermittenltly have jobs available. If you're used to posting only on your own site or on Craigslist (where ads do dissappear fast), consider leveraging other services and including your company/personal bio when you do. Even if it's only a contractor position or a role you are considering, these can have a dramatically positive impact (and you might find someone great to add to the team!).
#4: Avoid Wikipedia Pages & Other Free-for-All Sites
Wikipedia pages are powerful, right? Thus it must follow that it's wise to create profiles/pages about our companies or ourselves on the site to use for reputation management, too? Wrong.
The first rule of reputation management is - own the listings with pages you control completely. If other people can leave comments, edit your material, insert additional references or otherwisely editorially negate your work, don't bother. I've actually had to fight with Wikipedia's bureaucracy on two separate occassions to have my page there taken down. I have little faith in the accuracy, quality or intentions of their editorial board and with such a powerful profile (my Wikipedia page, the day after it was first created, with no additional external links I could find, ranked #3 for my name in Google and #4 in Bing), it's not worth taking chances.
This applies to many others (actually, TechCrunch's "Crunchbase," which I linked to above in the SEOmoz profile example, is another potentially risky candidate). Before you invest time, effort or external links, be sure of the general practices of the site around control of content and profiles. Generally, places like LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, etc. let you control that real estate unless you're engaging in serious mischief (and even then, they won't allow negative material to be posted about you on those URLs, they'll just take them down).
#5: Start an Alternative Blog
Blogs naturally attract a lot of links and external references, which is why so many reputation management SEOs recommend registering firstlastname.com or brandnameblog.com and using it as a professional or personal blog. What I don't often see, but have observed working brilliantly, is alternative blogs on separate topics using a similar system.
For example, imagine I want to control my name "Rand Fishkin." I'd not only run a blog at randfishkin.com, but I'd also strongly consider starting a cooking blog or a sports blog or a travel blog at randfishkincooks.com or the like. Yes, it will take work to set it up, author some real content and build up a web profile for the new domain, but if I can tie it to something I already do and love sharing, the references will come fast and furious.
Be sure, when doing this, to leverage your existing network for blogroll links and share via Twitter/Facebook/etc. You'll be surprised how friends, family and business contacts will come out the woodwork to link to your new property.
#6: Leverage Lower Quality Links for Social Profiles, Higher Quality for Self-Managed Domains
I'd never suggest buying crappy links, but if you must or if you have other links you control that are of questionable quality or you think search engines might consider low value or even manipulative, don't point these to your newly registered domains or the sites you own. Instead, point them at the powerful, high authority social profile pages you've created and let the engines decide what/whether to count them.
This works particularly well for nofollow links from comments, wikis and other social participation forms on the web. I'm not sure whether the nofollows directly get counted or if the pages get scraped and re-published in some followed format, but time after time I've seen examples of nofollows seemingly doing the heavy lifting to get social profile pages ranking.
If you own some old, neglected sites that are questionable in quality and rankings from the engines' point of view, you could try testing these by pointing them to other social profile pages (and observing/testing the impact on those URLs' rankings) before pointing them at your own profiles. Better to be safe than sorry, and there have been plenty of cases where aggressive SEOs have gone too far with linking to social profiles and had either the search engines penalize the pages or even the site administrators pull down the profile, wasting hours or days of work.
Have some effective reputation management tactics of your own to share? Please do - I'm sure those working in this sector will appreciate them.
p.s. Obviously, with Google's shift to showing many more pages from a single domain in the SERPs for a brand name query, this practice has become easier for some. In a future post, I'll try to discuss how to get that brand "entity" association with your site but in the meantime, I recommend two posts from Bill Slawski on the issue - Influence of Brands & Entities and - How a Search Engine Might Assume a Query Implies a Site Search.
Nice post Rand. Here is my Tip #7:
Own the domain [my-company-name]reviews.com (e.g. seomozreviews.com) and other variations. Add positive reviews, testimonials there and link it from your main site. In other words you are running a separate site just for hosting the testimonials. You can even go further and setup individual site for each product review (yourproductnamereviews.com like seomozsoftwarereviews.com). This is because prospects search for reviews before making a purchase. Your being an exact match domain may pop up at 1st position for queries related to 'your brand name + reviews' or 'your product name + reviews'.
My tips #8 is this excellent article: 36 Reputation Monitoring Feeds You Can’t Afford to Ignore
Nice idea here Himanshu! This is definitely a good one.
And, sorry to be the fun police, but I do think it's worth pointing out that anyone who does this should be very careful to provide only genuine testimonials/reviews here as you can end up in serious trouble if you're suspected to be falsifying reviews. That, and if this site is open to other people to review (and the reputation issues are a result of genuine dissatisfaction) I would be very hesitatnt to open up this sort of area to the public as it may feed the flames.
There is the potential this could work quite well (especially if someone is making false claims about you/your product and you've got loads of people willing to defend you)... just thought it was worth voicing a couple of the risks!
Brill, thanks.
I have one thing to add.
For #2, you should add rel=me tags to the links. This helps Google know for sure they are part of your online presence. It speeds up forming the social graph that helps you dominate meme searches on the first page. Alternatively, you can sign up to Google Accounts and identify the websites that way as part of your user profile.
The other benefit comes from Social Search. It can float relevant content for a search to someone in your online network (if they are logged into gmail, igoogle etc). Really important if you have a big network through linkedin or you are a fan of a potential employer on Facebook :)
Thanks for the added tips, especially the tag rel=me.
You alluded to this rand but a subdomain strategy works really well to occupy more top 10 listings (provided you have genuine content to add to the subdomains)
Spot on post. The spammy links to twitter work particularly well. We've seen a twitter account pass a heavily linked to ripoff report in a matter of days using nothing but xrumer forum profile link spam en-mass and hold the position for months (still holding in fact). Seems the overall strength of the domain and the percentage of links you create vs the links the domain already has seems to be quite the hefty shield against google-slappage.
I agree this is a good post except....
"impressed that the State Dept. had a formal program to encourage digital entrepreneurship and the promotion of Internet use as part of their mission to spread democracy."
I wouldn't say that being a tool of US Foreign policy is a positive thing. And I think democracy has been in Italy for quite some time (even though some might debate this owing to corruption)
Sorry to get all political ;)
Well... maybe the best thing would have to find information about the specifics of the Social Media Week in Milan.
It was about Social Web as Community services providers (we call it Città 2.0 - City 2.0), and a big part was about the use of Social Websites as a way to better the communication between Institutions and the Citizens... in this sense the purpose of the State Dpt. can fit in quite well.
And, well, better if I don't talk about actual italian politics :), that could reverse your opinion about my country democracy. And, as you allude, this is not the place for politics.
"If other people can leave comments, edit your material, insert additional references or otherwise editorially negate your work, don't bother."
Good point. This is one of the problems I have with our Google Places profile. Anyone can leave an anonymous negative comment with relatively no consequence to the commenter, especially if the person creates an account just to leave the negative comment.
First of all, being italian, let me try explaining why us Italians are so worried about reputation. Us Italians, but also Spanish people from what I could experiment, have a reputation syndrome far more before the Internet was simply imagined. The famous phrase "You don't know who are you talking to?!" is almost a way of thinking and reflects the actitude people and therefore companies have. Reputation in Italy, even more than in other countries, is seen has a strategic issue, because that means recognition of quality both on a personal front and business one; just think how almost all the Made in Italy products base their success on quality (from fashion to cars, from editorial products to industrial ones). Therefore, every attack to the reputation of a company/person is seen as an attack to the quality factor, essential in the business plan.
And, the second and more plain reason, us Italian are a complaining-for-everything nation, and we can be very creative in destroying reputation if we feel betrayed or cheated by a company. For more information about our creativity ask to @everywhereist (in this sense she is very italian).
Ok... you ask for other way we could use for reputation SEO. I mostly use all the tactics you suggest, but - even though is quite similar to the alternative blog tactic - when it come to reputation I sometimes use the microsite tactics too.
A practical example, let say an hosting company. Surely a company like that tends to have a fiercy reputation enemy in its unhappy ex clients. And they are usually tech and web savvy, able to create forums using you brand name and distorting it in order to damage your official one (e.g.: professionalhosting.com > theunprofessionalhosting.com [beware they are just example, I don't know if they exist for real]). In that case, and it worked for a client of mine, is to check out the opportunity to create informative microsites about the different services the hosting company offers. In that way, if in the main site the company offers SSL Certificates, you can create a microsite specifically about SSL, mostly informative and on the news. It could be a blog, but a microsite can be a good alternative if you have not the resource/time in order to feed regularly the blog.
Second method I use. When it comes to create alternative web spaces for a brand and if the company has a social policy (for instance helping students with no economical resource go to university...), that can be worth an ancillary website. In that case I would suggest also to host the site (with its own tailored domain name) in easy blogging platforms like Posterous or Tumblr (that could avoid the "search spamming" problem you pointed to).
Ciao :)
"Us Italians, but also Spanish people" - you can add Turkish people to this list too.. While I was reading your post there is a constant smile on my face because I can't believe how we act similar to certain situations.. I guess this kind of characteristics is usually same among the Mediterranean countries..
Yeah, like Keykan said, it's very similar with almost all Mediterranean Sea nations. :) Reputation is very important issue in this part of the World.
Start an Alternative Blog, is this like a niche site ? If you main site blog about many subject and you want to rank for each subject, you do some niche site, high ranked with one terms and link to the main blog ?
This post is really useful as we have just put forward a similar strategy for a client wishing to suppress some pretty negative stuff that is appearing on branded search in the SERP's. Thankfully we have suggested pretty much everything on here...phew! One other area we were considering, albeit not specifically an SEO tactic, is the use of sub-domains to dominate positions. Has anyone got any ideas, suggestions, pros or cons for this route?
For umbrella companies working on reputation management, I usually started by surveying their existing websites because those had often built value over time but weren't directly tied to the umbrella company's name.
By adding the company name in title tags (if appropriate given overall SEO strategy) and optimized linking from the About page of the individual companies to the umbrella company, we got some quick wins.
This can be helpful with nonprofits as well, because some of them have a lot of campaign-related sites that aren't well-linked with the nonprofit website as a whole.
Great post!
Excellent post Rand.
Your thoughts about different blogs for different themes also apply to some extent to individual blog posts on a single domain.
Making a small number of good blog posts (on your blog) over time, with your name in the title, can win you 3-4 pieces of real estate on page 1 of the organic search results. Examples might be: "Ben Acheson's to 10 steps to SEO success". I wouldn't recommend doing this more than 5 times and the posts should be about different topics to have any chance of ranking. But if you can get 5 posts in the top 10, that's half of the first page search results under your control.
Of course you can also supplement your organic footprint with paid search assets - further increasing your control over the SERPS (and perhaps showcasing your talents if you are in the search marketing industry). If you have an unusual name and are not well known, this can be extremely cheap.
Incidentally, I would not rule out the possibility of this very page appearing in the first 3 search results pages for my name. As Rand says, if you have knowledge and passion, you can use it to blog. But you can also use it to demonstrate your knowledge and/or enthusiasm for a topic on other excellent and related websites - such as SEOmoz. Remember, though, you have no control over other people's responses.
One of the things I love most about the web is that by contributing valuable content to each other we build communities, share knowledge, and promote ourselves and each other.
I've seen that strategy go horribly worng before when the related blogs were just pure nonesense with garbage content. If you are going to do this for yourself or a client, it's got to be good content, and you or your client must invest a bit of energy into making the blogs half decent.
Once thing that Rand didn't mention here whether or not to engage the offending reviewers directly on sites like ripoffreport.com or complaintsboard.com. In my opinion, doing so gives Google fresh content to spider, and can actually help these typically low authority pages and potentially give them an unwanted boost in the SERPs.
Another thing to steer clear of is fake reviews or software like LDL Robot. I can live with techniques that stretch my ethical boundaries, but when something is downright illegal? Unh-unh. See this article on posting fake reviews: https://www.nitrointeractivemarketing.com/the-dangers-of-fake-yelp-reviews/
i am the owner of vehom which is a seo company in istanbul Turkey. Reading these awesome blog posts about our industry helps serving with latest knowledge.
Nowadays i am searching for online reputation topics because my latest customer pays Vehom to remove unwanted results... This post will help...
Thanks Rand... Keep writing and stay motivated... :)
(By the way if you come to istanbul pls let me know. oguz [at]vehom dot c o m )
There are a few ideas I can think of, I guess the one thing that nobody has really touched on here, in the comments section so far, is buying your brand.
In other words, control the PPC space as well. The clicks are dirt cheap, and your well written copy will help to prevent Amazon Ads (as an example) from showing up on your SERP vanity page, and these ads usually show up due to some strange and bizarre mapping of Broad Match + dynamic insertion, so it's fairly easy to "Adwords" block them.
Back in the "old days", before Google WMT rolled out their impression and click share data, Adwords was a great tool to see just how many impressions your brand/vanity was getting. It still is, in that WMT only gives you about a 30 day rolling window on their data, whereas historical stats can be downloaded from Adwords reports anytime, on any live campaign.
The other thing about PPC is that control mentioned above. Google chooses what to show in Blended Search, your well crafted video sitemap may prove useful, } if { Google decides to show the video on the Search page. With PPC, you have complete control over messaging, completely on the Search page. Your video may be banished to the Videos tab, but your PPC Ad will not.
Now, you can get into the hairy situation of Brand cannibalization, but I'll save that for another day. In ORM, this shouldn't be an issue.
This was written with Google in mind, and can be easily applied to Microsoft Ads as well.
Amazing Post. I have been testing using link building campaigns to social media profiles for awhile now with good results. I think social media marketing is hard for some SEO's as it really involves becoming part of a community and at the same giving something valuable to the community. It's kind of the battles between quantitative processes and qualitative, where a SEO must be apt at both. I also like Himanshu's idea about creating yoursite(reviews).com as most companies inevitably will suffer from some bad reviews, but its important to make sure the good ones get to the public first.
Thanks for this Rand - great timing as this is a problem I'm facing at the moment.
Regarding #2, the online bio - would you recommend posting this on your main site or should you setup a new domain, like yourcompanynamebio.com?
Thanks
Profile links are great as long as you spend time updating the content as Rand suggests, this could take 6 months to a year , but as a long term strategy it works.
Take a look at the 'Social Media Marketing Guide' https://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics
This will save you a lot of time.
Hi Rand! Great post!
You provided us some really good ideas! I'd like to add is that you can increase your social profile internal link juice by finding the top users ordered by page authority metric. I mean, find the top pages of a social network, eg. Twitter, and then become friend of top profiles. So, if you exchange ideas and tweets with them you can get more internal links, and then more juice. You can expand this idea to all your social profiles. It's really useful.
I loved the ideia to focus on some social profiles but what I think you can use is to find social networks that provide dofollow links and take advantage of that. I don't want to say how, but you can do as you mention in your tatic #6.
The alternative blog strategy works wonders. We've used it with a few of our clients to great effect. I'm amazed that it's still such a hard sell sometimes.
It's so true, you want to be careful and strategic when it comes to reputation management.
Strategic is the key word. Make sure you have a plan before you go out there registering and posting certain content.
You want to be sure you can measure your results to see if it was an effective task or whether you have to go back to the drawing board.
That's a good suggestion. More information on rel=me is available here: https://microformats.org/wiki/rel-me
Higher Quality for Social Profiles - that is the way I do it. At least one permanent .edu backlink for my company flickr profile etc.
I also recommend creating Review pages, either with a third party website through a PR company or doing it yourself by opening a mini site including your Full name or Brand Name and having testimonials or customer reviews. These review sites get picked up pretty quick and you can help them by sharing them using your social media channels.
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/
Terrific guide, can't believe i just got to it now. reputation SEO is a toughy, maybe the toughest nut to crack when powerful domains have bad stuff to say about your brand.
Great article. It definitely provides some useful ideas on how to build a profile. As Google's recent changes limit have the same domain appear multiple times in the same SERP, particularly in the first few pages of the SERPs, some of these strategies can be very effective in maintaining a strong reputation.
PR campaign about new investment or new launch wold helps to secure few spots from top10 results. If you could get listed in techcrunch or in thenextweb, reputation management may go easy.
One of our articles on techcrunc received few hundreds likes and shares in all overs the social networks and that is what Google want.
Main problem is there you don't have a control on comments as randy mentioned in the post.
These are all great tips- The one thing you left off is leveraging Universal Search results in your favor. Creating a Google Places profile with your name as the business DBA works wonders, especially for searches that include a geospecific term. Other tricks I like to use are images properly tagged with your name, and also videos. Upload pictures to Flickr or Picasa, and videos to YouTube. Point a few links at them with the proper keywords and that should become powerful enough for Google to show them them in the gereral SERPs
Ah yes, this is the point I wanted to make. Google Places optimization has been key for our success. We implemented a promotion among our employees to encourage customers to visit our Google Places page and write a review. Our rating is now much higher than our competitors and I see us floating to the top of the local listings. I know there are other factors involved but I feel like this process has helped quite a bit.
Rand great post. I think reputation management is going to be the next big frontier in SEO. I was surprised to hear your harsh words about Wikipedia though. They do command a significant Page Rank and can help to improve a clients reputation. Especially, if said client didn't have a Wiki page prior to needing their reputation managed. Again, great post.
Excellent post! Thank you!
Your succinct list of the right social networks, based on effectiveness, just removed the panic-stricken look off my face! It's good to know that quality and a targeted "less-is-more" approach yields more favorable results over a quantity-based approach. The thought of having to manage countless (useless) profiles was as exhausting as the task seemed daunting. The Wiki info is great as well. I've seen it pushed as a top tactic quite often. Now, my clients and I won't even go there.
RE: #1 Social Profiles - Is there any service or search you can use to see any public profiles associated with your email account. So you could delete ones you aren't using. I have tried to find one and couldn't.
Not exactly, hopefully you are aware of your social footprint; however these links should help:
Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, cool tool to automate the process, and which recently received a c&d from Facebook.
https://suicidemachine.org/
How To Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites, a cool guide and difficulty rating for many of the Social sites.
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/11/how-to-permanently-delete-your-account-on-popular-websites/
Suicidemachine is great for fun, appreciate it because of its arty state. The other article is interesting, but a bit outdated. I would use some of the special deletion sites, handy as a reference, such as www.accountkiller.com. It also features a black list of sites on which it is (nearly) impossible to get rid of your account. Can you imagine why sites would retain your info? Weird!
Great post with easy to implement strategies. I have already started the idea of alternative blogs and this is a fantastic way to get increased traffic and search results. Now if I could only get some valid high quality link trades!
Very helpful post, thank alot.
Allso there's a list of social networks that DoFollow their profile links on the "Advanced Link Building Article" (which is incredibly good btw)
I can really relate to that Wiki warning. i had a client (chairman) that needed us to get rid of he's wikipedia page.. to be frank, we never could...
HI Rand, can you send me or post where I can find more info on the State Dept program, thanks.
Not sure where to find the published materials, but the State Dept. does help to connect folks like Marco & Social Media Week with guys like me. It was their introduction that faciliated my attendance and I was humbled to be representing not only my profession and industry, but my country as well.
Talking to my contact, my understanding is that the Dept. believes that fostering active online participation spreads the intellectual curiousity, economic improvement and democratic leanings that foster positive relations worldwide (and enable US businesses, tourism and positive government relations to flourish). I couldn't agree more - greater access to the web and greater participation on it, in every experience I've had, has meant positive things for a country/region/industry/individual.
Hey, Add ZoomInfo.com to the profile building list. And you can remove any web references they picked up that might not be relevant to your professional profile.
"Add a ton of fake reviews on ratings sites" suspiciously absent from list. :P
One thing to note about reputation management is that if someone has a bad experience, they will tell everyone they know. If they have a good experience, they typically wont mention it. Depending on your industry, it cab be a good idea to encourage customers and clients who are pleased with your service to post positive reviews on industry specific sites and provide testimonials.
I mean... it's quite logical: people tends to remember more what goes wrong. And if they buy something (product/service) people give for granted that it has to work fine/be useful.
That is why, as you say, it is always a savvy tactics to explicitily asks for feedback directly (customers commenting in "Ciao" kind of sites or Google Places) or indirectly (asking permission for publication on your testimonial pages).
Great post, Rand. Activity on social profiles is the part what people often forget after they make profiles. Lots of them make profiles and just leave them there to sleep. :)
And your #6 tip just gave me an idea what to do with one old site I have that Google seams don't love too much, but people do.
I agree with the principle that it is better to submit your details or link your business through more key sites and social media sites rather than to multiple sites. Just as with link building, it`s the quality not the quantity that counts and by using the primary social media sites fully this negates the need for using 20 other examples as well.
Great post as always. I think everyone would love to own the entire first page for their name or brand name. I always thought more profile pages = better. But I will definitely be focusing on the top ones listed above... however I still haven't played with Flickr much. Something to look into for the future.
Great blog Rand! I never thought of these ideas. Thanks for your suggestions!
Awesome post - really love the part about Wikipedia and never thought of it that way! That you don't essentially control the information it's a lightbulb moment for me (Should have thought of it Steven Colbert being banned and all haha) as we've been thinking about suggesting to clients that they have their own Wiki article, not anymore :)
Reputation is all about
Whether it is the real world or the virtual world when it come to business the word of mouth (WOM) is the most reliable and trustworthy source your potential customers will give a ear to . It takes time for any business to create a goodwill for itself in the market and that has to be earned over a period of continous quality services offered by your company. Online this can be achieved only if there is consistency in the presence that your brand has and aptly mentioned about the stock profile which adds an element of solidarity, trust and consistency on the online identity which has a recall value .And of course blogs and active participation in social media help in leveraging links and blogs being the most traditional form of social media which you have full control of they offer the social media benefit and also help in adding fresh content.Reputation is made or marred by every foot print you create on the web.
Thanks for sharing this information.
Nice information. I got the new social networking site from yr post
Thanks