I try to pay attention or note common questions that get sent to us regarding SEO and what have you. By far the number one repeated question we get is in the Reputation Management space, “I have created a page at all the social sites and we are still not able to push out the negative results?” I have had my share of posts talking about filing out social media/news sites in order to protect the top then, but I have always tried to emphasize that you can’t just fill them with fluff or watered down content if you wish for them to really make an impact on your search results. I am going to focus on just that in this post and hopefully shed some light and add to Mat’s recent post of how hard core and long term your reputation management strategy needs to be.

Understand Your foes
Do you really understand why the negative sites rank for your term? Every single Reputation Management issue I have looked at is different and needs different things. If you go about Reputation Management with a systematic approach with no room for adjustment or ramping up, then you will get stuck more often than not. It can be literally hundreds of reasons, and most likely a combination of multiple reasons. The most common reasons we have combated are:
Domain Trust (Wikipedia and Rip Off Report)
User Generated Content (a lot of comments using the term on a blog post is certain death)
Keyword Repetition and Stuffing (especially Title tag)
In Bound Links
Internal Linking Using Anchor Text

Usually it is a combination of both, the two that I am the most afraid of are Domain Trust and UGC. You need to know exactly what factors are helping that page rank, you should break them down into what you feel are the most important factors as well. If there are no inbound links, and very little content you can probably bet on Domain Trust being the major factor. If it is a new domain but has a lot of content and is linked to from the main navigation you can note that extra juice. Make a list of all the factors you think are making that negative page rank and try to note which might be more influential, then create a strategy to mimic it as much as possible. I know that we can’t know exactly why it ranks as we are not Google but if you have been around the block long enough and you really dive into it you can get it figured out enough to make that page lose it’s spot.

Copy Cat
Now that you have your map as to why your page is ranking, you need to try your best to follow it. Lets say you have 2 negative results ranking in your top ten results. One is a newer blog that got a handful of inbound links (10 and under) along with about 25 comments to which half of them mention your brand name. The second is a super old pre 2000 domain with no inbound links from external sites but 3 from high PR trusted internal pages. It has your name in the title tag, but the copy isn’t that long or strong.

Lets make it simple to get the point across, for the first site go find a blog that is at least 3 years old, has a good saturation in Google’s index especially no duplicate content or shallow indexing problems. You want to make sure your post gets indexed right away. If you don’t own a site you may have to due some shopping. Talk to friends, hit up forums like Digital Point or others, look at paid posts from places like pay per post or review me (although I haven’t had to use them). You want to be very selective, one of the reasons I haven’t used mainstream paid blog services is you are paying for a review and you may not get good comments and you won’t have a lot of control over your page. If you troll some forums to look for a blog to use you need to be very selective as there is so much junk out there. Pay a lot of attention to index saturation, index rates, and search Google using terms in other post titles to see if those pages are in the top 15-20 results.

Once you have your site, you need to look back on your notes, and pay attention to the on page seo factors. All the stuff from seo 101. How many times the term is used in the Title, Body, Anchor Text both internal and external, all that stuff. Then you want to mimic it with the content in a positive light. If we take our first example of the newer blog post, you would be noting, Title Tag, Body, Comments and then look at the link count both internal and external etc. Once your post is done, go and comment, and start a conversation. If you are not putting time into your comments and just trying to use an excuse to mention your Brand Name it will show and it won’t do anything to help you. Once your search results start to show this new post, the negative post will not be gone at the same time they will exist simultaneously for a while. Make sure these pages have great content because the best way to look shady is to fill the search results with a bunch of fluff.

It is the same thing for the old domain example try to find an older trusted domain to push your content, preferably not a social site as you can lose control of the page.

Why Spamming Squidoo Isn’t Enough
Back to the original message, filling out a lens on Squidoo, Claim ID Hub or any of the like is not enough to combat a well thought out attack against your company. You need to link to these pages and make sure the content is totally unique and not rehashed over and over. Link to RSS Feeds, other pages on your site and turn it into a page that is useful. Think how would I use this page if Reputation Management wasn’t an issue.

MAKE SURE THAT YOU DO NOT CREATE A LINKING BREAD CRUMB
Most likely the people that email me saying they have filled out profiles on 200 plus social sites and 4 of them rank in the top 20 and they can’t figure out why their negative page is still dominating all have the same problem. They link to all their hubs from each page. They create a reciprocal link circle that would make 1999 jealous. They leave a trail straight to Google’s office saying, “all of these pages are optimized for this company and they are all trying to rank for these terms, please spank them.”

Again think about how Google works and why that page is ranking against you. Google wants original content cited from trusted sources that isn’t the same as the other results. They want people to find what they are looking for as quick as possible so they are going to fill their results with diverse pages in order to offer as many options as possible. If there are 100 pages that are using very similar content and the only links they have are from each other that negative page will never go away in fact it may rank better as it is one of the only original page in the whole bunch.

Do not interlink any of your pages at all, and make sure their content is totally unique and different. Get links to all of them but from 100% different sources, and when you build links try and create co-citation with trusted articles and even competitors as that will also help you look more organic and natural and more like the negative page that is ranking.

The Secret Weapon
Social sites can be your secret weapon if used correctly and just like anything with seo if you use some elbow grease and originality you can create silver bullet pages that will always rank and that will build a virtually impenetrable wall blocking out any future negative pages. I see so many spammy Digg submissions or fake profiles trying to leverage the sites trust in order to out rank negative results and it never works. What you need to do instead of spending time filling out 200 profiles across every social site on the planet is pick a core group of 10 or more and turn your profiles into good accounts.

If you made a Digg account that was your company name and it made the homepage once or twice that thing will be top 3 over night. Create a Stumble Upon profile with your company name as the sub domain and go and rate some pages, have someone stumble your profile page after you have shared a good amount of useful content and before you know it that will rank like mad. A Mashable profile that comments a lot is going to rank, Del.icio.us profile that tags a lot of content and is the first to tag some pages that make the Popular status will rank over night as well. These are all legit methods and they work better than most anything as far as long term results that always rank. SEOMoz marketplace ranks really good as well.

I hope this has helped a lot of you that have been emailing, you are half way there just try to have a little more tact in your execution and work on some social accounts and next thing you know your negative listings will be long gone.

I am speaking on Reputation Management next week at SMX West if you are going stop by and say hi, I am going to give out some nuggets as well.

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*Update* New links at the bottom to some really good cases against Rip Off Report

Before You Jump to any conclusions, I am not saying sites that warn consumers of true scams and rip offs are bad, I think they are very very good. I love the Internet because it levels the playing field for small businesses and individuals to compete with big business. Before the Internet that was impossible. However, I do not think that there should be a place in Google’s search results for a company that does nothing to scan or proof read their “User Generated Content” and that also blatantly spams and violates Google’s TOS. This Brings me to the current marriage of Google and Rip Off Report.

I am sure you are all familiar with Rip Off Report, it is by far the largest database of complaints about businesses, individuals and pretty much anything on the planet from religion to government all the way to Racist remarks. Rip Off Report has been accused of all sorts of shady things, racketeering, black mail and rip offs. I am not going to get into the lawsuits against it’s owner Ed Magedsonon or any of the many allegations of what appears to be shady practices. What I am going to get into is how they are being leveraged to manipulate Google’s search results and how Google is fueling their questionable business.

Rip Off Report thrives off of ranking in Google’s search results, I would say that the only reason they are so popular is because of the relationship they have with Google’s search results. According to Compete.com Rip Off Report receives roughly 606,439 referrals from Google’s search results each month. I bet you wish your site got that many referrals from Google each month, in fact I would say most sites on the net don’t. From October 2007 until now (Jan 2008) those referrals have come from 5,761 different search keywords. Again this is according to Compete. I was curious about how Yahoo and Live treat Rip Off Report in their search results. I don’t think that you will find the results surprising as Google can tend to favor and love certain domains where as Yahoo and Live don’t play favorites as often.

I ran a ranking report on the first 89 keywords that Compete said where their top referring search terms. Here are the results you can download the PDF here

As you can see Google is definitely treating Rip Off Report different than Yahoo and Live. Live has dropped them from their results all together, so applauds all around for them. Something I found surprising was Yahoo has almost twice as many pages indexed (676k +) as Google, but ranks virtually nothing whereas Google pretty much ranks every single post in its index in the top 20.

Let Me Get to the Meat:

First I’m going to lay out how they are very much violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. For those of you that aren’t familiar with them you can view the page here,

Like I showed above Rip Off Report thrives, and virtually exists only because of Google’s treatment of it. Look at what they say on the home page to encourage posting with them,

“By filing a Ripoff Report it’s almost like creating your own web site
..And, it’s FREE.

Your Ripoff Report will be discovered by millions of consumers! Search engines will automatically discover most reports, meaning that within just a few days or weeks, your report may be found on search engines when consumers search, using key words relating to your Ripoff Report.”

They flat out say, we get your crap indexed and ranked in the top ten in a matter of days. That is music to the ears of a shady employee that just got fired.

1.)Technical Guidelines from Google:

“Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.”

If you search for Rip Off Reports search results pages in Google by doing this site:ripoffreport.com - intitle:”search results” it will bring back only the search results pages that are currently indexed in Google which on my results shows 49,400. That is a lot of pages that shouldn’t be in Google’s index.

If you don’t think this is a big deal read this article from Search Engine Land and the main post from Matt Cutts of Google.

2.)Quality Guidelines - Specific Guidelines Section:

“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Subdomains - w3.ripoffreport.com Exact replica of Rip Off Report over 2,000 pages indexed in Google.

Domains - www.badbusinessbureau.com Exact Replica of Rip Off Report over 17,000 pages indexed in Google.

3 Google Cached Links of the same exact post on all 3 domains, there are thousands of cached Duplicates.
1Cached on Jan 11, 2008
2 Cached on Jan 6, 2008
3 Cached on Jan 6, 2008

They are definitely up for Spammers of the Year.

3.) also from Quality Guidelines - Specific Guidelines Section

“Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.”

Check out the recent post attacking us

Check out the title tag,

“97th Floor It Is Better On Top Spy With Firefox 97th Floor social media scam spyware tracked users scam 97th floor firefox social media Internet Internet”

They mention 97th Floor 3 times, Firefox 2 times, scam 2 times, social media 2 times then Internet Internet at the end.

Common sense tells me that isn’t the way Google would like title tags to be written. If I was Matt Cutts and I followed Rip Off Reports logic to title tags, my title tag would be like this compared to the original.

Original Title:
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

New Title based off of Rip Off Report Style Optimization:
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Matt Cutts, Google Google and SEO Matt Cutts, Gadgets Internet Internet

Do you think the person that wrote the title for the post about our Social Media for Firefox ext. wanted it to rank in the top ten of Google? It was written on Jan 7, 2008 and indexed and in the top 10 of Google on Jan 8, 2008. Rip Off Report can I hire your spammer seo?

Most of the posts in Rip Off Report are totally stuffed full of keywords both in the Title and the body, it is so blatant it is a joke. This stuff makes BMW Germany look like a saint.

The validity of these posts are what brings me to my last points.

They State on their Homepage,

“While we encourage and even require authors to only file truthful reports, Ripoff Report does not guarantee that all reports are authentic or accurate.”

Doesn’t that contradict itself? I know that it is virtually impossible to guarantee that user generated content can be 100% reliable, but we all know the trouble that sites like Myspace and Facebook get into when things slip through the cracks, why should Rip Off Report be any different. What, they require that they post truth by putting it in the TOS, but never policing or following through. Here is how I know that the post about our Social Media tool is 100% crap or written by a brain dead idiot.

It reads,

“Install 97th floor social media attachment for firefox and get tracked.

Way to go, database user info…Whatever would that before.

Nice way to use your add-on -build your business at others expense.

97th floor claims it was an error. Pretty big oversight. 97th floor catches it after it could be to late for most users who downloaded it. Social media firefox cheaters. Good luck next time.

97th floor ripoff - tried to scam and now caught?

Tmx wpb fl
west palm beach, Florida
U.S.A.”

First of all is that even English? Second here are the facts. There are only 3 sites that posted that I may be trying to spy on people with my new Fire Fox tool. Seo Scoop, Ekstreme, and Sphinn which was a link to the story on Ekstreme. All the stories had updates within 24 hours stating that the bug had been fixed and that I handled it well and that we were in the clear and that it was a super sweet tool. So all of the sudden a post gets added to Rip Off Report on Jan 7th 2008 about 5 months after I released the tool, and it says I am a scammer and all this stuff, but the only places the writer could of gotten the content were from sites saying, “Updated, 97th Floor is in the clear”. So this was a blatant post to damage my companies Rep. and to rank in the top Ten for my name. As he even admits in the first post that we “clam it is an error” and that it was a “big oversight” so he read all the posts saying we fixed it and that it was a mistake, but posted it anyways. I wander if it is because on of our biggest keyword referrals from google to us is “Rip Off Report”

Look at the rebuttal which was posted a couple hours after the first post was made,

“Tmx wpb fl
west palm beach, Florida
U.S.A.
97th floor

Upon further review, the social media extension is legitimate. It has been modified and was a true and correct error. Will download again and continue to use.”

The guy says he loves the tool and that he is going to use it again. The time frame is so close to the original post that it makes me think did he post it, wait to get the email that it is live, and then go post the rebuttal, all as an opportunity to make it look real and to have an excuse to use the term, “97th Floor” a couple more times. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are in Rip Off Report and it is still bed buddies with Google?

Go to Google and type in “Sergey Brin California” you will see around number 8 this post(don’t worry Sergey No Followed that for ya).

Claims that some guys named Sergey Brin and Larry Page where drunk and picking up teenage girls in a coffee shop in California.

“I am sixteen years old and I met Sergey Brin in a coffee shop in Santa Monica. Sergey started talking to me and my friend and told us that he was a big shot in computers or something. He wrote down his first name and cell phone number and asked me to give him a call the next day to go out.

My friend left because she had to go meet her mom. I stayed because I was bored and Sergey bought me a milk shake. He really knows how to talk to a girl. He told me that he can get me in at any concert for free. His friend Larry arrived, and him and Sergey had to go. When I called his cell phone the next day, a message came in: ‘This is Sergey Brin, please leave a message.’ That’s how I knew what his last name is. When he called me back I asked him about the free tickets but he said that he wanted to see me to give them to me in person. I had a bad feeling about it, especially when I spoke to my friend the next day and she said this guy wants something. He is like thirty or even maybe older!

When i talked to him I told him I was sixteen and he said: ‘I don’t kiss and tell. He you want we can meet in a hotel, have a nice time and I’ll bring the free tickets’. ‘ Then he said: ‘Have ever had Vodka?’ I thought I would talk about this guy here because he is way too old to want to go out with me. I am a virgin, I don’t drink, and I am not meeting nobody in a hotel!
Peace-

Meredith
Beverly Hills, California
U.S.A.”

Then there is an update,

“I forgot to say that Sergey Brin was trying to hit on bothe my friend Maria and me at the coffe shop. He is really gross! His friend Larry introduced himself as Larry Page. Sergey Brin really smelled of liquor. BAD!! Larry seemed sober but he kept on looking at my boobs and my friend’s. Then Sergey Brin was asking if they were real, and it made me laugh because he was funny.

I think he was really drunk. At some point he poured something out of a tiny bottle in a paper bag in his cup of coffe. That was after my friend left. He asked me if I wanted some. I didn’t wanna sound like a loser but I said no. I had a bad feeling about the whole thing. Then like I said I talked to him on the phone the next day, but I did not make a date. He called me the next day and a few times after that. Sergey Brin sounded really drunk again! Larry Page sound like the same old pervert, but he didn’t try nothing, because his friend saw me first I think and my friend left.

Anyway he is too old for me that Sergey Brin! He said he drives a really nice car and wanted to take me for a spin but I was afraid of what he’d try to do to me in the car. Thank you for reading this.

Meredith
Beverly Hills, California
U.S.A.”

Then Meredith’s friend Maria Velasquez pipes in (but it was posted by Meredith)
I was there what a creep this Sergey Brin and his friend Larry Page

“My name is Maria Velasquez. That Sergey Brin guy is really creepy. My friend and I was at the coffe shop in Santa Monica and that Sergey Brin Guy and his friend Larry Page wanted to pick us up. I left because I had to meet my mom. I told Larry Page no can do. I think he liked my friend Meredith better because he kept on looking at her boobs. They were trying to impress us because Sergey said that him and Larry Page worked for a big computer company or something. Larry got mad at Sergey when he took a phone call and said Larry’s last name over the phone to someone. He said ‘Page is here with me, you wanna talk to him?’ That’s how we knew the other guy’s last name. Sergey Brin was just too drunk to care anyway. I’m not even seventeen yet and those two are way too old for me or Meri.
I LOVE JLO!”

LOL, “I LOVE JLO”…. You can’t make this crap up.

So to sum up an extremely long post, Rip Off Report is spamming Google’s index, and Google is currently letting them get a way with it. They know this and so do their users and as a result thousands of peoples lives are being ruined due to blatant lies and and made up stories. Again I am a lover of the Internet and as messed up as Rip Off Report maybe there is a place on the internet for lies and junk, that is the beauty of the net we all have a voice. However there is no place for this whatsoever in Google’s search results.

P.S.

All Links to ROR are Happily No Followed

I Love JLO

*Update Rand at SeoMoz is backing us up, and he brought up another TOS violation that ROR is engaging in. Read the post to get the full details but, it looks like ROR is not putting No Follow on Paid links and advertisements.

Also great post by Andy Beal and Distilled

And a new post diving head first into the legal side of ROR by Sarah Bird who is in charge of legal at SEOmoz

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What am I talking about? Reputation Management - My favorite subject of 2008!

2007 was a good year for cleaning up reputations of clients over here at 97th Floor. Chris and I pride ourself on what we have been able to accomplish for some pretty big businesses (and individuals) with online reputation problems. However; one thing has also stuck out, is how quickly some businesses give up on their online reputation problem. You have got to remember that in some cases (if you are finally starting to do something about it) you are going up against sites or articles that have been hammering at you for years. You are not going to clean that up with little effort, time or money.

If you think that you can easily clear up some bad search engine results after just a couple of months and a few hundred dollars, you are very mistaken! Its funny to me sometimes to see big businesses, that obviously have loads of money to dump into marketing give up after a few months with what they consider little results, or the “negative” results only moving down a couple spots. In some cases I have been told by company VPs that just moving the negative result from the #1 spot to the #2 spot has increased their sales, and reduced the number of canceled sales or charge backs. These negative results have caused some of our clients millions of lost dollars a year, so the money spent per month to get rid of the results outweighs the cost of the reputation management if you keep the long term picture in mind.

If you are in this industry, you know how huge pushing negative press down even a few spots is a huge accomplishment. I am amazed at how quickly businesses want to throw in the towel after a few months, if the negative press is not moved off the first page completely. My suggestion to these businesses that are going through a cleaning up process - be patient and hope even for a result below the page break on the first page. It will do more good for you then you realize.

You must remember you are going up against pages that have been indexed for years, have years of links built up, and have great trust and authority (although sometimes I don’t agree with how much authority (and trust) Google gives some of these sites in certain cases - but that is another post - another day).

Cleaning up your online reputation problem will take time, money and a lot of patience - make no doubt about that! Make it a goal in 2008 to do everything it takes to clean up your online reputation, and spend whatever amount of time (and available budget) it takes to do so, even if it takes until 2009. If you are in business for the long haul (like I am) then it must be done, and will eventually help your businesses bottom line. If you continue to tackle the problem head on, and not give up, you will get results - maybe not in a couple of months, but eventually you will win. I see proof of this everyday with what I do for clients that don’t give up to quickly.

If you are ready to clean up your online reputation in 2008, remember Chris and I have given you some pretty powerful information on reputation management already that should help get you started.

I also wanted to take this time to wish everyone, especially our readers a Happy New Year! 2008 is going to be an amazing year over here at 97th Floor, and I am proud to be a part of it!

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I really enjoy teaching people/clients about everything they can do to help them with their brand awareness and management, but there is something that does frustrate me. A majority of the time when I am working with a brand new (online) business owner, and I start to talk to them about the not-so traditional ways of marketing like Social Media to help them with their reputation management, they do not take me as serious as they need to be.

I want this to be the warning for every new to Internet business owner who is reading this post!

The reason a majority of the major businesses online have a reputation management problem is because they did nothing to combat it from the start. Lets face it, the bigger and bigger you get, the more people you are going to have that want to bring you down. It happens, and I don’t care if you are the “happiest place on earth” (like Disneyland) you will never be able to please 100% of the people 100% of the time. There will be problems, and you have to be prepared.

These new-to-Internet business owners tell me that they do not need to worry about their brand right now, because it does not make a difference and nobody knows them (or about their brand) anyway. Are they planning on failing, before they even get started? This kind of thinking could not be more wrong!

I can name a handful of companies off the top of my head like Wal-mart & Coca Cola who probably wish they had controlled their online reputation when they VERY FIRST went live online (if you visit the Google search results you can probably figure out why).

You may not be big now, and there may be no one searching for you at present, but aren’t you planning on it? If you control the first several pages of search results for your brand now, while no one knows about you, it is much easier and cheaper (to do so) then when you get big. I mean ALOT cheaper, (if it can even be done). There are some companies (that I know of) spending up to 10K a month just to help push down negative results.

Why not take care of this problem now, while you are smaller and the cost is a lot less?

Think about this - what if you are a company that dropships products, and you have 1000 satisfied customers, and you have one customer that did not get his/order on the delivery date you stated on your website. After investigation, you find out if was the postal (or shipping) company who was at fault, but yet the customer writes a negative review about you (before you even get a chance to make things right on a problem that you could not control), and your brand. Is this fair? It is not fair if that article ranks in the top 10 of the search results when people type in your brand name when you have had 1000 other happy customers. Think of how much business a negative result could cost you. However; It is your fault though, if it does rank because you did not do anything about it when you first created your business, and didn’t give a second thought to brand/reputation management.

If you can control the SERPs right now when you are new, and much smaller, this will not even be an issue years down the road because you have established your brand (for years now) and people only see the stuff you want them to. It will be really hard for a negative article to creep into the top 10 search results with all the content and pages that you have been establishing for the last several years.

Here are my suggestions -

1. Domain Names - Go and buy all the domain names that you can with your brand name in it. (of course all of the usual like .net .biz .org etc) but you can even be creative and use your name other ways too. Then write unique content for each one of the domains, and provide product information, product testimonials, maybe even some news feeds from related sources, or other related product review sites. Just do your best to establish these sites with good content, link building and Social Media as much as you would with your main domain.

2. Press - Pay someone who is a professional to write some amazing press about your business, have a contest, or launch a specialty line (something newsworthy) and submit it the proper sources like PR Leap (who allow anchor text links), Marketwire or oldie (but goodies) like PR Web. The most important thing you can do with press (for reputation management), is make sure you use the brand name you want to be found for (when people search out your name or brand) in the title of the press.

3. Create Social Media Profiles - You want to look for three things in a social media profile - Number One - Do they allow you to have a static URL (ie - www.squidoo.com/BRAND-NAME-HERE), Number Two - do they allow you to space for content, and Number Three - do they allow you to create links inside the content, and do those links pass any juice? You need to make sure you treat your profiles pages like you do (or should) the content of a website by mixing up the content and rotating the anchor text links you create. Specifically for reputation management purposes, these sites that allow profiles (or static URLs) do well:

a. Stumble Upon
b. Newsvine
c. Mashable
d. Del.icio.us
e. ClaimID
f. Squidoo
g. Facebook
h. EzineArticles
i. Technorati
j. MySpace
k. Twitter

Now there are many other methods that I use (and that can be used) for reputation management, but using all three of these methods mentioned above can really help establish your site for some time to come (especially if you keep it up, and don’t stop working on it). Controlling your reputation and brand this way is also going to cost you a lot less, then trying to clean up something negative after the fact.

I wrote this post to answer the question of those wondering why they need to worry about their brand, and reputation when they are brand new to online business, and I hope this helps clarify, even a little!

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These are ruff notes from my Presentation on Reputation Management last week at the E-Tourism Summit. Everyone was asking me to post them I think especially for the list of social sites to use as I tend to talk fast.

Reputation Management is the Future of Branding. Everyone uses the search engines in order to find out information about a product, company or individual. Google is becoming a reputation creator/verifier.

Securing the top 10, more importantly the top 5 results of your brand search are becoming more important than ever. When people research you in the search engines they will notice negative Titles and Descriptions ranking below you, they will often visit them prior to your website.

Proactive Rep Management a Good Offense is the Best Defense

1. Keep it off line, kiss butt, beg, apologize, do whatever you have to in order to keep your dirty laundry off line. It takes 5 mins to set up a blog and post something, and your cost to silence that piece of content will go up considerably after it goes online.

2. Own your name, every .com, .org, .net and domainsucks.com, etc…

3. Social Profile Pages can be good to help fill the top spots with pages referring to you: Squidoo, Stumbleupon, Newsvine, Delicious, Yahoo 360, Mashable, Claimid, Blogger, Twitter, Mybloglog, Amazon profiles, Ezinearticles, Blog Catolog, Naymz, Zoominfo, Myspace and Facebook, Wikipedia, and Forums.

4. Use What you have: Subdomains, Blog About Us, PPC

5. Use your key terms in the titles of press releases or other PR. Prnewswire and businesswire will rank for your name if you mention it in the Title.

Defensive

1. First put out the fire, respond in the comments of the blogger flaming you, respond on your blog to the allocations, kill the story before it spreads. Be the first to see the story. Make amends, a refund to that client will cost a lot less then hiring an SEO firm to suppress the page.

2. Set up Tracking for your branded searches, IE brands, products, employees,

Use Serph, RSS, Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts, Ice Rocket, Watchthatpage.com, Rollyo this will aggregate ROR and other sites that don’t offer rss.

3. email or call the blogger and ask them to take it down, you would be surprised how often this works.

4. If it is ranking in Google you may need to pull out the big guns, if so you can rent pages at sites like Presalepageman, sometimes you have to fight fire with fire ie:Trust, links and lots of content. Match keyword counts.

5. Rent Blog posts through Payperpost, Review Me, and other outlets

6. Good viral campaigns can work wonders for Reputation Management. When blogs mention your viral piece, or tool they will often mention your Brand in the Title tag and the Copy. *this has been a very good tool when going after stubborn pages.

For additional Info Check our Previous Blog Posts on the subject and Andy Beals Beginners Guide

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I have always been the biggest fan of Jim Carrey, and here are 3 more reasons why.

• Dumb and Dumberer
• Son of the Mask
• Evan Almighty

Need I say more?

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29 fortune 100’s have negative results in Google when searching for their brand. Some are as small as lawsuit details but some are specific awareness campaigns claiming such things as murder, destroying the earth and poisoning pregnant women. Regardless of the claim or the evidence behind it I was surprised that companies with such power were not doing something more in terms of Reputation Management in order to lessen the blow of these sites ranking for their Brand Name. Some of the sites are very well marketed and goes to show there is always room for the Little Guy in the online world.

The List:

1.) Walmart - Site called “Walmart Watch” which says,”Wal-Mart Watch is a nationwide campaign to reveal the harmful impact of walmart on American families and demand reform of their business practices.“

2.) Exxon Mobil - Two Sites one called “Exxpose Exxon” and “Exxon Secrets” Both are about how they hurt the environment and fund Global Warming Nay Saying Scientists.

3.) Chevron Texaco - Two Sites on called “Source Watch” is isn’t exactly anti Cheveron and Texaco but it talks about how they help fund Politicians in their Favor. “Clean Up Ecuador Campaign” illustrates arguments that they are destroying rain forest’s in Ecuador. The search Texaco by itself brings up “Texaco Rain Forest” about the same problems with Oil and Rain Forest’s. (more…)

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*We are not currently accepting new clients for Rip Off Report Reputation Management issues. Reputation Management issues other than Rip Off Report Feel Free to contact us. If you would like a referral to any companies we trust contact us as well.

*Update Please read these blog posts to get more information regarding Rip Off Report and how they are violating Google’s Terms of Use, as well as all the law suits and legal battles they are experiencing.

Google Your Honeymoon With Google Has to Stop

The Anatomy of a Rip Off Report Lawsuit

Since January we have successfully removed Rip Off Report 9 times for our different clientèle. I say 9 times as in 9 different search terms, like “Brand Name,” “Brand Name Product” etc… we now control 26 out of the first 30 pages for these clients and have filled the search results with information on awards and recognition they have received. Rip Off Report is on it’s way to the third page and we are going to make sure it never sees the light of day. To one of our clients this will mean a savings of over $600,000 a year as they have been loosing on average of $2,500 a day in sales. Another client upwards of $200,000 will be saved annually. (more…)

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Reputation Management is going to play a very large part in the Future of SEO and everyone with a name or brand they care about needs to pay more attention to what the search engines are telling their potential customers. Google validates everything and if joe schmoe says you suck and it ranks in the top ten for your name, well then guess what? You Suck. (more…)

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If you are even remotely watching your rss right now you would notice that nearly everyone in the seo blogsphere is talking about Jennifer Laycock and her blog The Lactivist getting hit with a letter from Jennifer Daniel Collins an Attorney at Faegre & Benson who represents the National Pork Council. The letter in short says, “use of the phrase “the other white milk” violates their trademark on the phrase “the other white meat.” As such, they’ve demanded that I remove the shirt, demanded that the image of the shirt be removed from any site I know of, demanded that I destroy any shirts that exist with the logo and demand that I not at any point in the future use the phrase in a commercially profitable way.” (more…)

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