A friend of mine in the Real Estate business came to me a few months ago to ask for some advice on SEO. I went out to lunch and gave her some pointers, then got back to being busy and simply forgot to ask her how it was going. On Saturday she called me asking if I could help out with her desktop machine, as it had become badly virally infected. While working on that, I asked her how the her site was doing.

“Oh, I hired a company to do that for me” was the reply. Then she turned round and handed me a manila folder with some documents in it. “Here’s what they did for me”.

I pulled out the first document. It started off with screen-shots of submissions to the major search engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN & Alexa?… ok, not a great start, but I continued through this document… there were submissions to directories. Ok, let’s take a look at those… hmm, never heard of the majority of them, and quite a few aren’t even in English , this looks like a default directory submission from some tool…

Ok, next document. It’s the invoice for $1750, with “no refunds, no cancellations” typed on it. I ask if she has a contract, or even an email outlining their work, the reply was negative. From the sounds of it, she was cold called, and promised the earth, or #1 rankings in G, Y & M for local Real Estate terms, which amounts for the same thing. The salesperson obviously did a good job, because she gave them her credit card details and sat back. Well, she didn’t quite sit back, she kept calling them to see why she wasn’t #1 yet, and their response was “It’s organic, give it a little more time”.

The next document was a copy of the code on the website, but it looked a little strange, so I went to her site and looked at the code. They didn’t match. This was puzzling, had they only given her recommendations and not implemented them? Then I noticed the URL at the top of the page… it was for a different site.

Yes, a different site. So I asked her if she owned that domain? “No, they did that” was the reply. I reviewed the code. The title tag contained her name, and her name alone, none of the keywords that they were going to magically get her to the #1 spot for, just her name. The same was true of the H1 tag. (Note: this new site doesn’t even rank in the top 50 for her name).

Content on the site was terrible, with keywords stuffed, more strong tags than you could shake multiple sticks at, poor look & feel, all on an extremely long home page. The sub-pages were even worse. In order to save time, given that theirs is obviously a volume business, they had scraped content using the title of the page. Yes, this could potentially work for unique terms, but when you sell Real Estate in a place with a name like Sterling, you may want to check the results…

What else did I notice in the code? Well, the most interesting thing was a nice big ad on the page for USA SEO Pro’s, which wasn’t the name of the company that she had hired. Since I can’t imagine that they’d altruistically put a link and an ad on for a competitor, it must be the same company (in fact the testimonials on their website refer to the initials of the company that she hired, so they are the one and same company), but why didn’t they use their own name? A quick search for usaseopros reveals why…

Now, wherever they have a negative listing, such as on the Real Estate Blog, or on Ripoff Report, you can see that they’re actively going into those sites and responding to the criticism. Of course, the responses that show up are from ’satisfied customers’ and ‘proud employees’ both of which, based on my experiences with my friend’s site, are false.

So where does this leave my friend? She paid $1750 with no contract, and no defined deliverables. They ‘did some work’ and ‘delivered some documents’. The site they’ve ‘worked’ on doesn’t belong to her, they can take it down at will, there’s no guarantee that they’ll transfer the domain to her if she asks them to (which is what I’ve asked her to do, despite the fact that it shows not one incoming link, I guess those Lithuanian directories really take time to register). As for their #1 ranking promises, all verbal, nothing in writing. What can she do? Most likely not much, except warn others about her experience, and take this as lessons for the future.

1. If something sounds too good to be true… it is
2. Get everything in writing
3. If you know someone with experience in that particular industry, drop them a quick note to get their opinion, and find out what questions you need to ask.

I’ve told her that I’ll give her a hand when I can, and that in the meantime she should read and learn from real SEOs who have experience in the Real Estate market, not scammers.

I guess the people at the new Adam and Eve Agency (UK) didn’t do some due diligence to find out about the problems they’re going to face… I wonder how many potential clients will type mistype their adamandevelondon.com url without the ‘london’ part? Although it obviously didn’t stop them from getting Cadbury Biscuits as a client, so congratulations to them on that.

Unfortunately their site doesn’t yet list their services, it’ll be interesting to see if Reputation Management is one of their specialties.

As more and more companies become aware of the issues surrounding online reputation management, more and more are realizing that they need to do something about it. Reputation management issues can be caused by many different sources, such as disgruntled customers / former employees, bad press, self inflicted PR problems, and so on. When you detect that there’s a potential problem, then it can take time and effort to resolve it. So why oh why do some companies insist on muddying their own SERPs with junky results that don’t provide any benefit for anyone searching for their company / product?

Here’s an example. Searching for the Kansas power company WESTAR, I found the following result.

This result was showing up right above the fold, so it was immediately visible to all.  What they need to do to get this listing out of the results is either 301 this page to the new domain, or noindex it.  301′ing would be preferable, as it would move any link equity over to the new site.

How about IHOP?  Here’s the second result for a search for their site:

 Not really informative, but it displays as it’s the only text on the page…  maybe they should think about adding a more informative description tag, or putting some text on their home page?

These are just a couple of quick examples, but take a look at your SERPs and see what’s showing up for your brand and your products.  Is there anything that stands out?  Is it something on your site that you can easily fix?

A new year means a new chance for companies to repeat the mistakes that others made in the old years…

For instance, if you recall, at the end of 2006, Microsoft decided that the best way to get people to review their new O/S - Vista - was to send them a free laptop to test it on. Was this seen as a bribe by some? No, it was seen as a bribe by most, and resulted in some bad publicity.

Apparently game publisher Electronic Arts has decided to go the same route, according to the popular online comic Penny Arcade, along with a review copy of their new ‘Orcs and Elves” game, they sent a new black Nintendo DS, just to make sure that the reviewers were able to play it. Here’s the comic, and note the email that the guys sent back to EA. A potential reputation management issue for EA? Sure, they’re getting called out here for pretty much the same issue that Microsoft ran into. I’ve already seen this comic showing up on social media sites, all they need is people to start blogging about it using words such as bribery in the copy, and who knows what may start to show up in their branded search results…

Comic by Penny Arcade

I’m heading over to SMX-London to do a presentation on Reputation Management.  Currently I’m sitting at the Lufthansa gate at Dulles airport, waiting for my first flight, which will be taking me to Frankfurt.  On the way here I stopped off in the Duty Free shop to do some browsing.  One particular display caught my eye, and in fact had me do a double take.

Yes, American Candy, with Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, Nestle Chocolate and Nestle After Eights…  Ok, Cadbury’s is English, and Nestle Swiss.  Maybe they were made here?  Nope, in fact the Dairy Milk was made in Singapore???  If they’re blatantly providing misinformation such as this, how can I trust them about anything else in their store?  Were I to be purchasing a ‘designer’ handbag or perfume as a gift, 2 items which I wouldn’t know much about, how could I be assured that their claims of authenticity were correct?  I couldn’t… so I left empty handed.

So there you are, checking out the SERPs for your company. All 10 on the first page look good, you feel good about life…

Unbeknown to you, at that very same moment, a disgruntled customer is blogging about the poor experience they had in your establishment that day. Mere minutes after they press ‘Publish’ on their blogging software of choice, their post is spidered, and the SERPs for your company suddenly look different.

So the answer to the question in the title is: a few minutes.  (Disclaimer: yes that last listing for Claytime Cafe is from my personal blog).

The same goes for the non-SERP visible results, such as on rating and review sites.  For example, while yellowpages.com may show in the SERPs that it has a listing for this company, there’s no notification to the company when a poor or negative review for their business is added to their site.  Again, a poor review can be added top one 0f these sites in seconds, so the company needs to have some way of finding out about these reviews, so that they can respond in the most appropriate manner.  Whether that means that they have some automated way of monitoring them, they monitor them manually, or they pay someone to do it, it needs to be done.  Nothing affects a business more than having a poor reputation.

Reputation management is an issue that quite a lot of people are aware of, and are becoming increasingly aware of as it pertains to search engine results.

Back in the pre-web days, when someone was unsatisfied about a service or a product, the most they’d do would be to write a letter, tell their friends, and in some extreme cases stand outside the business telling anyone going in about their issue. All of which could dissuade someone from purchasing from your business. These days, all it takes is someone with a blog to put up a post about how they didn’t like your business, and literally within minutes there’s a listing showing up against your name when someone searches for your business. For instance, I had a bad experience yesterday at a local party place, which was the venue for my daughter’s 6th birthday party. Within 10 minutes of writing a blog post about the experience, it was ranking in the top 10 for their name.

So what does that have to do with crime? Well, I read in my local Sunday paper this morning about my local court system going online with the “best case management system in the state, if not one of the best in the country”. I took a look at their system, and the way it’s set up, it’s not going to be a reputation management issue for any companies, but other criminal systems that are out there may be. For example, if you do a site: search on the URL for the Virginia State Sexual Offenders Registry, you’ll see that there are over 20,000 pages indexed. That’s ~20,000 pages of Sex Offenders and Violent Sex Offenders, all with their place of employment listed in lovely spiderable text, and yes, they can rank for a business name.

What can you do about it? Well, firstly you should have diligent hiring processes in place, so you’re not going to get a surprise one day. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t hire people that have ‘paid their debt to society’, but you should ask the right questions to know that they’ve had to pay it. Secondly, and most importantly, you should be proactive in your optimization efforts. If you own your search space, then it’s a lot harder for these issues to rise to the top, plus it’s a lot less painless than having to de-optimize a negative listing, which will be visible to anyone searching on your name until you do…

Sometimes Reputation Management issues can’t be helped, you may have disgruntled former employees, former customers with a real or perceived issue, or just someone who enjoys talking down other companies / competitors. But what about self inflicted wounds? Well, as the BBC has recently found out, something as innocent as a little kitten can cause a big reputation management issue. Children’s program ‘Blue Peter’ ran a online vote to name the newest pet on the show, a cute fluffy little kitten. The winner of the vote was ‘Cookie’. The winner that they announced on the show was ‘Socks’, which was chosen by the production team as a ‘more suitable’ name. Naturally, the news leaked that Socks was not the name chosen, and the show has now received a black eye. Already you can see that a search for ‘Blue Peter’ in Google has the news about the deceptive vote in first position.

So what’s the moral of this story? Well, you should be as honest as you can be in your dealings with your customers / donators / audience, for if you’re not, at some point the truth is going to come out, and you’re going to have much more of a reputation management issue than if you’d gone down the right path in the first place.

It has been reported today that Facebook lost 6 big brand UK advertisers due to a lack of controls in their ad targeting. The main complaint of these advertisers was that their ads were being displayed on the group page for the British National Party, a right wing, anti immigration, anti Europe political party. Yesterday, it was reported that Vodafone and First Direct had pulled their advertising, but that Virgin Media, Halifax, Prudential, and the AA (Automobile Association) still had ads displaying. Today, all 4 of those companies pulled their ads. Virgin even went as far as to pull all advertising from all social media sites.

It looks like Facebook needs to implement a better way of targeting ads, so that companies can be ensured that their ads don’t display in locations that are against the goals or beliefs of the company. According to the article, Facebook hasn’t yet commented on this story, but given that they’re apparently charging $300,000 for a 3 month placement, you’d think that this issue would have moved up the priority ladder over the last 24 hours…

<update> If you go to the BNP group page (which I’m not even going to no-follow link to), you’ll see that there are now no ads displayed on that page.  However, there are other BNP groups out there that still have ads displaying, maybe Facebook will clean those up too…