The Golden Bell and Whistle
Reputation management is ridiculously expensive. We regularly own 3, 4, and even 5 sites in the top ten for competitive phrases. But reputation management is more expensive to pull off. Silencing an authority site is a pain – especially when you can’t just pay them off to remove the article.
Methods
1. Affiliate Programs
If it’s a term like “scam” or “ripoff” on an information product, it’s usually pretty easy to slap down. Just monetize the phrase.
2. Hijacking
This borders on the lines of being illegal. This means we can’t advise it. But we will allow your creativity to connect the dots on using Dejan’s hijack method. Years ago, proxy hijacking was very popular. So if you find a ton of proxies and get all of them to index a particular page, you can probably get one to win the original content. It usually never ranks itself, but it will demolish the page you targeted.
3. Owning the Search Results Page
This is expensive, and usually not worth pulling off. If you or your client suffered something that needs to be handled this badly, chances are this won’t actually fix a reputation.
Problems
1. QDD Problems
When a massive site covers a story, QDD will always keep authority sites listed. Sometimes it’s easier to get that authority to cover you again. You might have to run press releases every few weeks to keep the newest story on top. You might have to engineer a story like Ryan Holiday’s book Trust Me I’m Lying would suggest. Once you get the authority domain to cover you again, build links to that new page so it stays alive.
2. Autocomplete
We have not tested making phrases show up on autocomplete in over a year. The last time it happened for us we picked up on a few patterns but haven’t been able to make any “stick” – especially since it seems to be so location-heavy lately. It’s not on our list of things to test in the near future, either.
Keep in mind this is strictly theory and we’ll only put 10% confidence behind it… Go to Yahoo Answers, Web 2.0s, etc. Type up the new title as you would like it to be. If it’s “Your Product Scam” maybe create a bunch of pages so the title is “Your Product Scam Proof” or “Your Product Scam Not True” – the goal here is to create a mini-trend going along that Google might pick up. Look at “Autocomplete Fail” sites and try to reverse-engineer the ridiculous phrases. You might be able to divert a portion of the search traffic this way.
Action or Inaction?
Reputation management is expensive. You aren’t making direct money from it. It’s often easier to just start over entirely than to repair what is broken. There are always exceptions, but rebranding is how most companies (RCS) do it.
Think about Blackwater and how much awful press they received (or deserved). Do you even know the name of Blackwater today? When is the last time you heard negative things about them on the news? (Except when this happened.) But that’s RCS saving the day. Rebranding is cheaper and easier, plus it gives you a chance to control the tone of your brand again.
NSEO?
We may create a section for this on its own. It’s just negative, and a bad vibe. It certainly works, but we don’t want you to get in the habit of taking down someone instead of building your sites up.