I recently had the chance to ask search engine optimization expert Aaron Wall about reputation management and how to use different social media tools to “squeeze out” negative references from showing up on the search results page. This was a topic that Aaron had written about in the past and I am grateful to Aaron to take time to answer my questions
Q: I read the post you made back in January “Fighting Off Negative Publicity and Affiliates in the SERPs” where you offered a large number of resources that are available. So where does a company start? Let’s assume that negative information about a brand or company has come out and this negative information has started to show up in the SERPS. From all of the options that you identified in your January post, what are the first 3-5 steps that a company should take and why?
Aaron: I think the first step is to have empathy for the person who is writing negatively about you. Is there any truth or logic to what they said? Does it seem like something where contacting them and apologizing might sort out the issue? Don’t contact them unless the apology is sincere. If you think they are a nutcase then no sense contacting them, skip on to the next step.
Do you have an “in the press” section? One of the easiest ways to bury negative information is to feature positive coverage on your site. Pages that were ranking #12 or #15 can jump up to the first page if they are linked to from an authoritative page on your website. And a natural extension of this idea is to hire a PR firm if you can afford to, and create press worthy content that gets mentioned in the press, then link at it from your “in the press” section.
Does your company have any logical reasons to have a subdomain? One for investors or business partners? Free tools, a forum, or perhaps video content? Most brands should own at least one strong subdomain, and more if it makes sense. Currently a search for eBay on Google shows a YouTube video and Wikipedia page on the front page of the search results. Everything else is from Ebay.com.
Q: A company can have information about its brand spread across multiple social media web sites. From an SEO perspective, how do they all relate to each other? If you interlink them all, are you not creating your own network and will this not cause you problems with Google at some point?
Aaron: If you are using 1,000 cheesy social sites to linkfarm across them it might not be the best way to use your time, but many brands are expected to have a Twitter page, a MySpace page, a Facebook page, and a YouTube page. In some cultures and languages there are other sites that are just as popular as the above 4 are. If you say “connect with us” and link to those sites from your official site then many brand fans may subscribe which will lead to lots of internal links from those authoritative sites promoting your brand page and helping it rank well.
Q: Somewhat related, but is there any SEO benefit to owning your brand name and/or company name across a wide variety of social media sites like MySpace, Squidoo, Delicious, etc?
Aaron: In the recently leaked Google quality review document they stated:
“it is not uncommon today for individuals to maintain various types of personal pages on the Web. Homepages, social networking pages, and blogs have become increasingly popular. Some individuals have more than one blog and/or more than one homepage on a social networking site (e.g. myspace, facebook, friendster, mixi). When these pages are maintained by the individual (or an authorized respresentative of the individual), they are all considered to be Vital.”
From that I would say that Google expects to see these pages rank for brand related queries, and it is a great idea to promote your brand on these sites. Some of the more well known sites are probably worth putting more effort into than the smaller sites for 2 reasons
- many of the smaller sites are inundated with spam AND many of the official brands do not exist on them (both of which make Google less likely to want to promote pages from those sites)
- the larger networks have more members, which puts your brand in front of more people.
Thanx again to Aaron for his time and insight on using the SERPs in fighting negative stories about your company or brand.
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Reputation management is a delicate and interesting project to handle. I think the party involved with re-tooling a company or brand’s reputation also has to think about how to highlight the positive aspects while properly and honestly attempting to address the negative elements that have sullied the reputation in the first place. If there is truth to the slandering, then beyond just a sincere apology, I think the brand owes it to its users/consumers/customers/readership/etc. to actually clean up the mess before handling the task of reputation management.
Great post! I didn’t really get it but then again, I’m not into the whole business deal.
Reverse seo — an interesting use of social media tools, and I’ll not argue against it on principle.
But there’s something to be said, too, for the company that engages with negative press, and whether by admitting to or owning its mistakes, or by answering legit complaints, makes an “investment” the trust and integrity of its brand identity.
Great comments Marty and Adrian. The first step should be to fix the problem not rely on reverse SEO to bury any bad news.
Whether or not the reason behind the smear tactic was ethical, fabricated or otherwise, the fact remains that information laying around like that is damaging for a company of any caliber.
The ends must justify the means and for most, leveraging social media sites or web 2.0 properties has the ability to outrank a less dominant site with less authority. Just a response that works, nothing wrong with that.