SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

In my past article about Google bombing where I mentioned how current President George W. Bush ranked for the term “failure”, I discussed how this technique could be used to manipulate rankings and even hurt a competitor’s business or a person’s name. Matt Cutts, of Google, announced that they have changed the algorithm to reduce the effects of this problem. Reports have come in indicating that this tactic is no longer effective.
Since that time, web entrepreneurs have unnecessarily worried about this happening to them. While some businesses may have been affected by this malicious intent, for most businesses and individuals, the concern is largely unwarranted and over-exaggerated. To put things into perspective, link building is a tedious and time-consuming task. For someone to attempt to rank a site for a non-relevant term, it would have required lots of links. Links cost money (even time=money). The sheer number of links required to rank for generic terms would easily deter most people. That’s why link building is usually outsourced to SEO experts because companies understand the value of their time and focus instead on their core competencies.

I suspect a large part of the algorithm takes into account relevancy of keyword phrase to the site that it is pointing to.  Thus, a site selling electronics is not likely to rank well for sports equipment since none of the keywords and content on the entire site correspond in any way to the keyword being searched.
It is relieving though to know that this tactic cannot be used with much effectiveness anymore. Such malicious behavior online can seriously damage a person’s reputation. Companies getting bad publicity still have to deal with it and one of the ways is through effective online reputation management. One way is to “push” negative search results from showing up in the top 10 is to create separate sites built around the company getting the negative online publicity and rank these new sites separately. The effort should be combined with an effort to contain the problem and not ignore it hoping that it’ll go away. This can be accomplished by simply opening up a dialog with the other party to resolve any “sore” issues. Facing the problem and addressing any hurt caused will go a long way to establishing a company’s reputation and customer loyalty. Remember that it can take as little as one complaint to hurt a business.

A better more proactive approach rather than “complaints handling” is to manage your customers well.

Here are simple key points to take note on customer relationship management:

• Regularly ask for feedback. Sometimes, customers keep quiet about their dissatisfaction. These customers tend to be the ones that will stop doing business without telling you why and leave you wondering why the customer attrition rate is so high.
• Handle complaints when they occur immediately. Don’t hide under a rock and pray that it’ll disappear. Deal with it as soon as possible to avoid it escalating further. The sooner it’s handled, the less probable it’ll end up in some blog or forum post.
• Have a complaint handling procedure. Don’t leave anything to chance. Make sure everyone knows how to handle them and do training on it if you must.
• Get everyone (not just customer service) involved in the servicing of customers and clients in the business
• Track your customer complaints. Just like everything else in business, get it down to numbers and study the trend. If you’ve already put systems in place to handle it and it is still occurring at the same level, find out why. If it’s decreased, find out what aspect of your business made the difference.
• Maintain regular contact with your customer/client. Build rapport and trust with them so they’ll truly be honest with you.

Customer relationship management is really not rocket science as many books will lead you to believe. Often times, it’s just dealing with it face-to-face, heart-to-heart. Unfortunately, when businesses get big, they also get dumb. They become impersonal and faceless. Customers trying to resolve simple issues have to jump through hoops to get what they want.

Instead of thinking how much you can take from one customer, think about lifetime value. How many more transactions will this person have with you. How many friends and family will they send over as referrals. You’ll be on your way to a happier and more fulfilling business when you focus on taking care of the customer.

We covered Google Bombing in an earlier post and how the method can be extended to influencing your own search engine rankings.

Google Bowling, however, is quite different and very real. It is used by unscrupulous online competitors whose sole interest is to sabotage your business by getting it banned or penalized from the search results.

Google opened up this possibility when it started addressing the widespread link popularity manipulation of sites obtaining an excessive number of site-wide text links (notice we mentioned excessive, one or two small site-wides shouldn’t hurt but be careful about overdoing it). Google filtered these sites by penalizing or removing the site from its database.

Unscrupulous competitors saw an opportunity in this. If buying site-wide text link ads can get their site penalized by Google, what would happen if they bought it for their competitors instead?

The implications of this technique, if unaddressed, could be devastating to small businesses affected *and* to Google. Google could suffer because the perception that search results are more relevant is the only thing that gives Google the edge in the search market at the moment. Without a positive perception of it’s search results, search users could turn to other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. Such an exodus would drive Google’s search advertising revenue down and cause it to lose huge market share. There is already a growing number of people who dislike Google’s treatment of websites.

A possible solution would be to simply discount such site-wide links altogether and not penalize it. This can be seen in Yahoo’s discounting the value of site-wide links and no longer putting a large weight behind a bunch of links coming from a few sites. Google, however, may still treat the sudden increase in links as unnatural behavior and ban it. If that happens and it really wasn’t your fault, consider a reinclusion request covered earlier.

A new anchor text and backlink tool with a funny name – Neat-O Backlink Tool has just been made available. Anchor text is a powerful method for ranking websites as I mentioned in earlier posts on anchor text optimization as well as the phenomenon of using anchor text to ‘Google Bowl’ another site.

This tool is a little slow when we tested it but it does a fairly decent job. It’ll return a list of sites linking to the URL typed and the corresponding link text associated with each link. In some cases when it takes a while to access the site, it returns a ‘timeout’. In other cases, it returns ‘not found’. From the backlinks we see in the results, it appears to be using the Yahoo API.

Certainly, there are uses beyond just checking on your sites. You can use it to research your competitors sites and see where their backlinks are coming from and what link texts they are using.