This week SEOmoz Global Associate, Will Critchlow, talks about one of his many areas of expertise: Reputation Management. We're not talking about press releases and public statement, this is about controlling the SERPs, stealth style.
Whether you're playing offense or defense, controlling the search results for yourself or your clients can be an extremely important part of presenting a positive image. Will discusses how you can work behind the scenes with content that already exists to help spin the picture the engines can paint.
One obvious area where this can be extremely important is the political arena, where candidates live and die by public information and fragile image campaigns. And nowhere is dirt slung faster and more furiously than online. Will was recently interviewed by 'Total Politics' magazine about the subject of political rep management online and his company, Distilled, recently launched a new service targeted specifically at Political Reputation Management.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Stealth Reputation Management with Will Critchlow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
By: Scott Willoughby
Whiteboard Friday - Stealth Reputation Management with Will Critchlow
Whiteboard Friday
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
I was once an elected official and mayor of my little 'burb, so I read with mild amusement that "political reputation management" will be offered as a service.
Will you be offering brain replacements or character building services? I ask, tongue firmly planted into cheek, for it's my observation that a politician's worst enemy - 99.99% of the time - isn't "the rumors" but him or herself. Yes, indeed, politician's reputations ultimately sink because, in fact, "they did it" beyond a reasonable doubt or they are proven, beyond doubt, to be a (whatever).
So, what's the "value proposition" of online political reputation management going to be? Showing falsehoods to be just that - malicious untruths, connivances, mudslinging? To the best of my knowledge the WWW does a pretty good job of revealing nonsense to be nonsense all by itself - without professional intervention or management.
But still, even though things work pretty well all by themselves, that leaves room for experts and consultants, and endless consulting work, since the stream of nonsense that is uploaded to the WWW is endless and politicians have some hefty warchests. ;-P
I'd suggest to anyone who wants to succeed in the realm of online political reputation management that the single most important talent such a firm will need is the ability to pick clients wisely. If you don't choose and pick your clients wisely you and your firm will soon be smeared by your efforts when it comes to light that "the SOB really did it" - and your firm ran the campaign of deflection, denial and spin.
Then again, some firms thrive on doing dirty work. :( (You look too honest for "that" line of work.)
I wish I could give you a +1 insightful, Jeff. That is a very wise comment. We have been lucky / good at choosing with our clients to date (including politically-minded ones). The counter-argument I'd like to give to your (I hope you won't mind me saying, slightly cynical) view is that any politician needs to think about their online reputation - just look at the rumours (untrue ones) about Barack Obama flying around. He is on it (apparently) but he definitely needs to make sure he thinks about it even though the vast majority of bad things said about him are untrue. Indeed until recently, an untrue urban legend about his religious background ranked on the first page of search results for his name.
Will, I'm perfectly comfortable in my skeptics role - cynicism if you will - as I don't much mind being made wiser by being proven wrong in my skepticism.
And I don't disagree that a politician "needs to think about his/her online reputation".
What I do lean towards disagreeing with you is the proposition that a "online political reputation management service" will have - how can I put this - a long shelf-life. Why do I think this? Because I believe that "such a service" could be viewed as antithetical to the "forces of the WWW" or how the "mind of the Web" likes to think of itself.
I say the utmost skill must be applied - in the most minimal application - or any effort to "manage reputation" will only serve to undermine reputation, once word gets out that "there are design and control elements at play/work".
I say let the online dialogue run its natural course. Let folks who are moved to speak speak all on their own. Let "the truth" come out "naturally". AND IF there is an "orchestrated attack" in the works let the Webizens identify it all on their own and speak to or against it. It lends to credibility. Any effort to orchestrate undermine credibility in the age of the WWW.
In 2008+ I would be very very reluctant to view political web reputation as a subject of command and control - or expert managment. The new bad word, when it comes to reputation managment, will be "effort to control", with all its precedents: damage control, spin control, etc.
Stay out of the dialogue. Observe it. Observe that others are observing it and are responding. Observe if there is evidence of "ranking games" going on and if others are observing and reporting on that.
Consult? Sure. IF the candidate has limited clues about where the dialogue that matters is taking shape or how to enter that dialogue. But enter the dialogue / interaction that IS the Web - as a dialouge (reputation) manager - with the same caution that you would enter a pit to pull a thorn from a wild tiger's paw.
Most thorns tend to work themselves out by natural forces.
More good points, Jeff. I lean very much towards the idea that the best way of controlling this stuff is through being as upstanding as possible, but there are clearly things one can do to portray oneself in the best possible light - especially when under attack. And we recommend completely non-manipulative techniques - linking to your own good press is just good self-marketing, for example. Perhaps the biggest learning point for me out of your comment is that it should not be called reputation management...! It needs some reputation management of its own.
That's a start. :-P
Interesting video Will, I think you need a beard though to do Whiteboard Friday effectively though ;)
Will... check out these options before you film your next one. I vote for this one.
Thanks Scott. For PRO members, check out the latest tip - very relevant to the subject of reputation management.
What's up with all the <a href="javascript:void(0);/*1214547951093*/"> links in this post?
I think it's something to do with firefox 3 (Jane twittered something about it the other day). Links should be fixed now!
Thanks Tom. Wonder what the issue with FF3 is?
Dunno - I haven't installed yet, my FF2 is so pimped out with plugins I'm wary of installing FF3 incase none of them work...
The broken javascript links are a result of an incompatibility between fckeditor and Firefox 3. We know about the problem and are working on it.
Work faster, Gosh!
Seems fckeditor is FCK'ed then!
Yet more evidence of my theory (that I came up with this morning) that Will has killed and eaten Rand. When will we learn?!
Nice tip about helping good stories on authoritative sources (like the NYT) outrank bad ones, instead of just focusing on your own websites. I kept getting upset when I noticed that an online PR source was outranking a client, until we finally woke up and started using that site to our advantage. Sure, I'd rather have the original site rank, but better to have my client's story rank on the PR site than the competitor's story.
You could also buy up 5-word domain names that are related to the client, and use them to build fake fan pages... with animated gifs of the American flag and a marquee element on both the top AND bottom of the page. SEs love moving text, it's a proven fact. Don't forget the MIDI file.
So is err the new WC hammertime? I suggest you'd only be mildly intoxicated rather than unable to poke yourself in the eye as you would be after TC hammertime.
Seriously though - better skills than me, you speak slower for starters :-)
Nice video too - I think online reputation management is going to throw up some really interesting things over the coming months. For example, how do the search engines deal with you:
As this service becomes talked about more I think we'll see some conflict with the search engines over how they handle some of this stuff. I love online reputaiton managment, it's like SEO only you have more variables involved - it's a lot of fun.
Yeah - serious props to Rand for being so smooth when he does it. I'm normally better with the ums and errs than I was in this one. I don't think I'd planned exactly what I was going to say well enough.
Noticed that too, in your intro. But you pulled it together and explained it very well, so no worries.
I wouldn't normally think it's all that common for people to write articles or stories for websites. In our industry it is common, but would you mind giving us some examples of mainstream celebrities doing this?
A lot of politicians and celebrities (in the UK at least) write for newspapers - see e.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/11/01/do0101.xml written by the new mayor of London. He might want his byline to link to a page of all his stories - a bit like this: https://www.newstatesman.com/writers/rosie_millard
That's a great tip which doesn't only apply to Celebs, but also to companies that might have unfavorable reviews on strong domains.
Keep it coming!
Will, very nicely done! I used to live in England (London and Middlesboro...pause for natural British Reaction...MIDDLESBORO?? Why!) Anyway, always a pleasure to hear those brit accents again, keep the good work and tips coming...thanks!
I have an American friend who picked Middlesborough to support (at football (soccer)) when he arrived - mainly because he said it wrong I think...
Thanks Will...good info!! But it sounded like you called it "WhiteBoy Friday". Wasuup wit dat!!?!!??!
Haha. Sorry. I'll try to enunciate more clearly :)
It's all good! ;)
I kinda like "WhiteBoy" Friday. Gives it a bit of an edge!!
Oh, and Steve (imnotadoctor) and I came up with Whiteboy Friday's a year ago. I thought that it would be a great spoof but we decided to scrap it becuase we didn't want to bite off of Rand's idea. ;-)
Great video Will! I find myself quickly searching through every article we've ever had published in Google...
Great video! Good luck with your political reputation management work.
I also appreciate your care and concern with creating natural-looking search results pages. So many efforts to manage reputations result in a funny looking "Digg profile overload," or many firms outsource the PR work to unskilled overseas bloggers and it ends up making the client look illiterate. I am a big fan of finding "neglected" pages that are focused on the same person or a person with a similar name, and optimizing those:
https://www.copybrighter.com/blog/online-reputation-repair-promoting-other-peoples-pages
If you want more actionable tips on online reputation management, please subscribe to my blog on the subject.
Thanks Brett. Subscribed. Don't know how I managed not to be subscribed already.
This seems like an interesting cross between SEO and Crisis PR. Is there a tendency towards outsourced online reputation management on the part of the PR firms or is that something they are trying to handle in-house? I would think they would want to keep a few degrees of separation between themselves and any kind of manipulation of online results.
We tend to see PR companies keen to work with partners - many don't have the skills or desire to do a lot of this stuff themselves.
I believe some are doing it in-house / saying they can do it. It'll be interesting to see where it goes.
Nice work Will! Were you in Seatlle for this?
It is important to promote the right types of positive results. But creating the social profiles is proactice reputation management. Claim the client's accounts before someone that wants to trash them does. There is nothing worse than a Flickr account with your name on it and a bunch of negative images in it! Plus if someone was out to get the client they have a good chance at ranking that profile with a little work.
Great advice Will, this doesn't only apply to celebrities though some negative reviews on leading websites.
[link removed]
Hello, thanks for great advice. Would it be theorically or even pratically possibile getting a single url (so not the whole site) penalized in some way in order to disrank an url which contains old news that for example could be not still true and potentially damaging? Thanks :)
Interesting thought and I'm sure I'll get flamed for this post. I don't actually suggest you do this and these are from a theoritical standpoint.
Barry Schwartz wrote an article about negative SEO that describes the most common tactics. Those tactics run from whitehat (tattling) to illegal (not blackhat - actually illegal) like a denial of service attack.
The thing is, if it is possible, it has uses waaaay beyond reputation management. I don't believe it's possible for most pages - if it were, someone would do it daily to the people at the top of any money search.
I have heard many rumours about it being possible to dump pages out of the index, but not (recently) seen it actually happen and be attributed to an action. Maybe I don't hang out in the right bars.
*THEORITICAL THINKING*
Do I think it happens? Yes.
Do I think it's used to deliberately drop people out of SERPs? No.
If I'm ranked 2nd for a term and you're first if your site is inaccessible due to a denial of service attack then it doesn't matter that you're above me because a user would click on your site, not be able to get through and then likely come to mine.That's for a denial of service attack. I used to work for an online adult company and there servers were constantly being targeted. Was it expressly for SEO purposes? I highly doubt it.
The other methods I think would become less effective the more powerful the site is that you're trying to target. Unnatural link building wouldn't take down the NYT or Yahoo but I can see it working on MumandPopsWidgets.com
I can't spell - "Theoretical"
Great video, Will & congrats on launching your new service.
My dream office comes with a white board wall.