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.

When most people think branding, they think about what happens offline. The familiar names of large corporations come to mind when slogans like “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight…”, “You’re in good hands with…”, “It’s everywhere you want to be”. You can quickly see that these are instantly recognizable companies and brands. When you think tissues, it’s Kleenex. When you think computer chips, it’s Intel.

Online, however, business owners tend to neglect this important aspect of their ebusiness. This can be a deadly mistake as you’ll see with the few real-life illustrations. Online, people are looking for reasons to trust your business. They form quick opinions based on surrounding search results. If any doubt is cast on it, they could end up buying from someone else.

Let’s say you run a retail outlet. Imagine how your customers would feel if there was an irate customer at the service desk shouting or yelling out about the poor service/product he/she got. What will they think? As a business, damage control is vital to keeping your good name, even if you’ve made an honest mistake. Some people don’t forget easily and carry the chip on their shoulder long after the incident is over. Bad word of mouth spreads much faster than good word of mouth, and that’s a nuance of human nature.

A high profile target of bad publicity is President George W Bush. A search for the term “failure” yields the his white house biography.

LogoWorks, a leading online logo provider, encountered bad press online from discussions about how they copied Delta’s logo and sold it cheap to its customers. While it was an honest mistake from the point-of-view of the owner, the damage was done. Sales plummeted because the discussion was picked up by Google and ranked alongside their site in the top ten results.

Home Depot, the home improvement store, had to deal with an unhappy customer who created a site called homedepotsucks.com. The site no longer ranks but you can bet it hurt sales while the negative publicity was clearly visible in the top ten rankings early for several months starting last year. People who buy their goods from Home Depot will surf over to see what is on that site just out of curiousity. Home Depot learned its lesson and appears to have registered homedepot-sucks.com.

In a more recent example, Paypal is currently the target of bad publicity. Just type in “Paypal” and paypalsucks.com is ranked #2! Not a good start if you’re trying to earn trust from new merchants.

Just to see how rampant this behavior really is, if you use the Google operator inurl by entering “inurl:sucks.com” without the quotes in Google, you’ll see that there are about 36,000 sites with the word sucks in the url. Just previewing the first 100 sites alone reveals companies like Paypal, Disney, Target, Ford, Compass Bank and even Bill O’Rielly have the word sucks after it.

We wonder what the true motives of setting up such sites are: whether it is for public service, or to slander the company, or simply to make money off of it. Whatever their motives are, these sites exist and their appearance must be dealt with if the company is adversely affected by it.

The cheap way is preventative management. Before anyone can register yourdomain-sucks.com or yourdomainsucks.com, you do it first. Sure, you’ll have to put up the cost of the domain registration but the domain remains forever unavailable as long as you own it. Also take into consideration variants on a domain like home-depot.com.

Once the problem arises, however, it could prove to be an expensive and/or tedious task to have those results removed or pushed down by complimentary results of your other business units or supplier/customer sites. It could also be costly to have an attorney send cease and desist letters to the owner. You might even have to resort to buying the domain for a hefty price (maybe that’s what they wanted to accomplish in the first place).

Catherine Seda discusses Using Search for Public Relations & Reputation Management at Search Engine Watch. She brings up another example of reputation management that must be handled promptly and effectively or it could turn into a public relations nightmare. In this case, the target is Walmart. She also advocates a proactive approach in branding and online reputation management through outlets like PR which has helped companies like Southwest Airlines and Verizon Wireless.