Copy Brighter

Just as there are countless "credit repair" companies who claim they can erase past debts, there are now a multitude of reputation management firms claiming they can "remove negative search engine listings."

A Spotless Reflection. image credit: benprks

So, can negative listings actually be removed from Google? Not just making them less visible by pushing them down off the first page... but actually making it so the page no longer exists?

"Yes, it is possible to remove some types of pages."

But the most common kind of web reputation damage - strong pages on strong domains that have been consistently ranking for months or years - are often incredibly difficult to budge. The owner won't take them down till hell freezes over, you have no valid legal case, and Google won't give your (more recently created) pages the same weight.

But negative results can sometimes be permanently changed or removed with persistence, tact and savvy. Here's how:

8 Ways to Remove Negative Results from the Google

1. Ask Nicely
I've gotten nasty information removed by calling the blogger and having a nice long "blogger to blogger" talk with them. Appeal to their conscience. Explain why it's good for them to change the information, and explain why hosting negative or defamatory info might reflect poorly on their own website. Don't accuse them of bad journalism or insult them - respect the effort they took to make the content but urge them to consider an alternate headline, tone, etc. Ask if there's anything you could do to help them out in exchange (write a review, give a link, do SEO for their site, send them a "thank you" gift, etc.).


2. Ask the moderator to remove the offending thread or post
Sometimes the author of the information won't budge, but a forum or social site moderator will want to avoid conflict and will be more receptive to removing defamatory or misleading information. It usually doesn't hurt to ask.


3. Audit the site for Google Webmaster Guidelines violation, and report them
Check to see if the site is buying or selling any paid links, keyword stuffing, hiding text, cloaking content, or doing anything else in direct violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you find anything spammy, report the site to Google or report paid links inside of Google Webmaster Tools console.


4. File a DMCA Takedown Notice
If the site is infringing on your trademarks or copying your content, and they are located or hosted in the USA, you can file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice with the OSP (online service provider) and if that fails, you can file it with the search engines. Check out this excellent guide to enforcing copyrights.


5. Offer a Cash Payment / Settlement
Some people have successfully offered a cash settlement to have negative information down. A lot of online bloggers are in it for the money, and so are most of the reputation extortionists (Web publishers, like the RipoffReport, who encourage and directly profit from anonymous complaint content). It could be cheaper and easier to "pay to make it go away" than to pay for months of reputation management, content and link building efforts. Beware, though, of opening yourself up to ongoing extortion. And be careful of what you put in writing. You might want to contact the webmaster anonymously, by telephone, to test their response to such an offer, rather than send them a written letter or e-mail that they could reprint on their website.


6. Threaten a Lawsuit
You can send an official-looking letter threatening to sue people for defamation, and that could be enough to scare people into taking down content. Beware: if you threaten to sue someone, make sure you have a case and actually plan on following through with it, if necessary. Many times, I've seen legal threats backfire and make the situation flare up much worse. Threats of litigation bring out a harsh and unforgiving side in people, and it can prompt your defamer to want to "stick it to you" even worse.

For more detailed legal information on some of these suggestions, ChillingEffects.org or any of the excellent posts of SEOmoz's legal expert Sarah Bird are great places to start.

Blackhat Reputation Management Tactics:

It's important to be aware of some of the more heavy-handed tactics, even if you don't practice them yourself:

7. Negative SEO
For a long time, people believed that "nothing another Webmaster can do will be able to harm your websites' rankings." According to some black hat SEO experts, that is not true anymore. Negative SEO techniques, such as link spamming or buying penalized sites in a similar niche and 301 redirecting them to to your competitor's pages, are "enough to have a relatively dramatic impact on rankings." This Forbes article on negative SEO is pretty well-done and interesting.


8. Counter-Attack the Reputation of Your Critic
Some people have successfully counter-attacked their defamer, by anonymously exposing "fabricated" details of their past, making a YourDefamerSucks.com site, or filing a ripoff report about their business. This would theoretically give you a stronger bargaining position to suggest that you mutually withdraw the negative information - by kicking some empathy into your defamer. I haven't done this, as I am not really a "digital hitman" for hire - but I've heard others have done it successfully.

The Importance of Making Good Web Karma

In the social media era, we all live in very transparent, digital "glass houses." And throwing stones is as easy as a few clicks on the keyboard.

Remember that defaming others on the Web can have a profoundly destructive impact on their business, career and life.

Interact with kindness, humanity and positivity and start creating positive content now to build a spotless reputation on the Web. Monitor your reputation, and quickly and tactfully respond to grievances and to make sure they don't escalate or get cemented into the search results.

And think of these removal techniques as an emergency last resort, when all else has failed.

I'd love to hear your own ideas and experiences with removing negative links in the search engines. Please leave your comments below...!

"Wow! Amazingly clear. Great writing. Invaluable insight."

That is what I found myself thinking, again and again, as I read Radically Transparent, Andy Beal and Judy Strauss's 368 page guide to monitoring and managing your reputation online.

I have mixed feelings about a lot of marketing books. They are either too breezy and conversational - like Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae (it's enjoyable and has great insights but you can read it and "get it" in about two hours.) Or else they are too dense and nearly impossible to sit down in a chair and savor (like Eugene Schwartz's seminal Breakthrough Advertising).

And at least half the time, books on Web stuff and technology are out of date by the time they are published.

"Radically Transparent: A Guide to Managing and Monitoring Your Reputation Online" is one of those rare, comprehensive texts that is also inimitably readable and enjoyable.

I respect this book because:

• It is well-researched. Lots of statistics, research and authority quotes are used to support the book's arguments.
  
  
• It's smoothly organized. Smooth idea flow, and "Thought Byte" and "Defining Moment" clarifications of key concepts.
  
  
• It's very up-to-date (as of March 2008). The examples are all respectable and relevant.
  
  
• It's comprehensive. Even if you know a lot about SEO and blogging, you might not know a lot about online photo and video best practices. And it all gets covered.
  
  
• It's lucid. Even if you understand some of the concepts covered, you probably can't explain them half as clearly as this book does.
  
  
• It's humble. Difficult and controversial subjects (like reputation attacks, fake blogs and paid links) are discussed in a neutral and unassuming fashion.
  
  

If you are a public relations professional, marketing director or a business owner, I can't think of a better introduction of blogging and social media with an emphasis on reputation management.

If you are an SEO, social media marketer or reputation management professional, I can recommend it just as highly. Here's why: Even if you know quite a bit about online reputation management, you most likely don't have the breadth of experience that Beal and Strauss have explaining it to clients. They take complex concepts and make them elegantly simple. This book will pay you back at least 10 times the cover price when helps you verbally straighten out a client's misunderstanding, or when it helps you land a new contract.

I didn't know about several of the social sites and services it recommends, and reading it would have saved me hours on previous campaigns. It also has dozens of tips about branding, tagging, naming domains, writing for engagement, images, video, and reputation management theory that are ace.

This book might not give up any deep inside secrets about Google's algorithm or advanced profile hacking tactics. But it's just as well, because those will be history by the time the year is finished - and they probably aren't fit to "print" in a paper book.

Radically Transparent is a substantial, informative work and I predict it will be a respected resource on online reputation management for years to come.

It's well worth buying and owning.

Running an affiliate program is incredibly dangerous for those concerned about their online reputation. Here's why:

This Google results page casts a heavy doubt on the Rich Jerk's reputation.

By paying people to promote your product, you are giving your affiliates (and their competitors) direct incentive to create content about you and your brand.

And you have very little, if any, control over what they say about you.

In the first decade of online affiliate marketing (the 90's), people mostly stuck to the positive. They would create glowing reviews about products that offered commissions. And they would give the highest rating to products that paid the highest commissions.

But just as television content is becoming more shocking, more explicit, and more edgy to maintain waning levels of viewer attention... affiliate marketing is getting meaner and more cut-throat, also.

The Dark Side: Anti-Marketing

The dark side of affiliate marketing is based on a simple flaw of human psychology - where "bad news sells better than good news." Reverse psychology works well and bad reviews are much more magnetic than positive stuff. The trade term for this kind of promotion style is "anti-marketing."

I blame The Rich Jerk as the person primarily responsible for pushing this trend to the tipping point, by teaching it as a premium "secret marketing technique" to thousands of newbie affiliates in his ebook. Nowadays, it has become standard practice for affiliates to declare your product a "scam" in the title and description tags, in order to get more attention and clicks. They will viscously bash your product and try to send you to a landing page for a competing product that pays them better commission:

This page (rightfully) bashes a product in order to promote affiliate links for a competing product.

Even affiliates who wholeheartedly believe in your product - who are actively trying to promote it - will engage in anti-marketing nastiness, in order to get more attention and clicks:

This affiliate page uses a highly sensational title and description to promote the program.

The Downward Spiral

The negative meme tends to spread quickly, regardless if there is any evidence to support it. It incubates when pay-per-click gets oversaturated with dirty ads. Average people who are interested in your program read the affiliate pages proclaiming that "it's a scam!," and they start posting on blogs and forums to ask if it's really a scam or not. Before long, the top organic listings fill with a dirty speedball of libelous affiliate pages and skeptical user generated content - casting a nasty shadow of doubt on your good reputation.

At this point, your brand is permanently stigmatized and your conversions will drop off sharply.

Suggestions for Affiliate Marketers:

1. If you run your own affiliate program, make it an explicit part of your terms and conditions that "anti-marketing" is not allowed, and people who advertise your program as a "scam" will be promptly and permanently removed from the program. Make this clear up front. But be tactful: A booted, disgruntled affiliate who knows how to promote pages is potentially very dangerous. He can easily turn to an affiliate competitor who strongly encourages him to bash your brand.
   
   
2. If pay-per-click ads get out of control with negative dirt, you can try to register your trademark with AdWords (or another PPC network) and prevent people from using it. The specific rules and enforcement vary from network to network.
   
   
3. Most importantly: Start building a formidable front page presence of strong pages and profiles before your affiliates and competitors do. Let the peanut gallery affiliate pages show up on page 3 - taking a back seat to the solid portfolio of pages, subdomains, press releases, profiles and blogs that you already created and populated LONG BEFORE they ever heard about your program.
   
   

Even if you aren't running an affiliate program, learn from the drama in the industry. Understand how easily third party anti-marketing can damage your legitimate business without cause. Start building your web profile now and don't wait until it's too late, because repairing your online reputation is much more expensive and SEO labor-intensive than preventive reputation management.


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Getting your home page to the top of the search results used to be the pinnacle of search engine success. But now that online reputation management is increasingly important, it's essential to cultivate multiple top listings.

Creating a secure online identity profile usually requires at least 10 or 20 pages that rank for your name. It takes effort to build, groom and strengthen all these pages – but the security they will provide is worth it.

Don't Make Too Many Profiles

Each type of search result (profile page, press release, blog post, etc.) has its own signature look, so even to the untrained eye, too many user-generated social profiles on the first page look unnatural. It looks even worse if the profiles all say something similar or they have phony sounding self-praise in the description.

Camouflage Through Diversity

image credit: Martin Heigan

Google deliberately avoids showing too many listings from one domain or "flavor," and it usually shows a wide variety of sites and opinions so that users can find what they want quickly.

Cultivate a natural look for your brand in the search results by strengthening the positive and neutral results that already exist naturally. Get some links to the university alumni news bulletin that mentions you. Make some profiles that point to the blog by the Australian guy with the same name. Or take that non-competing company with a similar name on page 2, and put it in the Yahoo! directory.

Diverse listings look natural. The diversity will draw people's eyes to the pages that are obviously about you - where profile overload can encourage them to dig deeper back into the search results and uncover the "dirt."

When negative publicity stings, it's tempting to try and "force" bad results away by overloading. But remember: Google doesn't want you to build links or throw up dozens of new listings overnight. It treats quick changes with suspicion.

So be patient. And don't botch your online reputation by rushing.

Building Quality Profiles and Finding Links for Them

Social media sites let you create pages and links on relatively strong domains. Occasionally domains fall out of Google's favor and popular link sources get "nofollowed," but new dozens of new social sites and services are launched every day. Find them and use them to gracefully build out the foundation of your online identity portfolio.

Lots of thin, spammy profiles won't get you far. Instead, build a few profiles up with real content (blog posts, photos, friends, unique and valuable information) that will make them interesting enough to link to. Your Flickr "Pro" profile can be filled with incredible, rare travel photos. An Amazon profile can contain a substantial review of a new product that bloggers and shopping comparison sites will reference. Your company Del.icio.us profile can be developed into an up-to-date, "creme de la creme" link resource for your industry.

It's not easy to get quality links for personal and profile pages, but every page has a natural link partner somewhere out there on the internet. With some creativity and elbow-grease, you can make your profiles content-rich and compelling enough to get the internal and external links that will help them float to the top of the search results and stay there.

Then you'll have some control over the first page, and random user-generated comments and content is much more likely to show up on the second or third.

It's important to act quickly - the moment an online reputation issue is first detected. The longer you leave an undesirable search result to sit in the open, unchallenged, the more likely it will get "cemented" into place. When an interesting result stays on the first page or two of the search engine results, people (and automated content scraping sites) have a tendency to link to it and reinforce it.

Here are 13 types of pages that can contain negative buzz:

1. Authoritative Government Pages

Difficulty: (10/10)

The reputation management kiss of death is an entire negative page on an powerful government website. If the US Embassy, Federal Post Office, or the Securities and Exchange Commission dedicate a web page to warning about you, it's almost impossible to compete with.

2. Feature Articles on Top-Tier News Sites

Difficulty: (9/10)

Top-tier news sites (CNN, BBC) pack a lot of domain strength - and they stick to search result pages pretty hard.

3. Popular Wikipeida Entries

Difficulty: (9/10)

The general populace has adopted the site it as the quickie research tool of choice - and their countless citations have strengthened it. Many Wikipedia entries on companies or public figures contain a "criticism" section, but the contents are supposed to contain verifiable facts (lawsuits, convictions, news incidents). You generally don't have to worry about people saying you "suck," but widely-held opinions and factual incidents can get worked into Wikipedia.

4. Articles On Authority Blogs

Difficulty: (8/10)

As at 97th Floor noted, popular blog posts can be very dangerous. A post with dozens or hundreds of comments denotes significant buzz and interest, and it also creates copious amounts of keyword-rich content. Best respond to negative blog posts quickly - by contacting the author, responding in the comments and taking SEO action – as appropriate.

5. "...Sucks.com" sites.

Difficulty: (7/10)

Dot com sites that contain the keyword plus a pejorative term in the URL are a challenge, but they aren't impossible. They have a sticky tendency to linger around, because search engines (particularly Google) like to display a wide, balanced range of opinions and content so users can pick their own flavor. Sometimes "...sucks.com" or "...scam.com" sites are propped up by just a handful of links from the owner and they can be worked around. But if they enjoy widespread support and link popularity, it can be a real uphill battle.

6. Rip-Off Report Listings

Difficulty: (6/10)

The Rip-Off Report is a notorious "consumer complaint" site that encourages people to vent their accusations and frustrations, and it allegedly profits from blackmailing business owners. Because the content is so "interesting" it enjoys a lot of domain authority in Google, but I've found its listings can often be outranked with a little bit of elbow grease.

7. Active Social Media Profiles

Difficulty: (6/10)

Social networking sites are link rich and user-generated content pages on them can rank well. An active social media account with your brand in the username could theoretically outrank your company's official site.

8. Press Releases

Difficulty: (4/10)

Syndicated press releases can show up strongly in the search results, but they are often temporary and fade out with time (especially if they don't get picked up).

9. Personal Blogs

Difficulty: (4/10)

Personal blogs and others with limited readership and anemic link strength are easy enough to outrank with any of the kinds of pages listed above.

10. Forum Posts

Difficulty: (3/10)

These days, search engines seems to be show more respect for blogs than forum posts and some forum software creates posts with poor on-page optimization and dynamic URLs. But watch out: over time, an interesting forum post can develop into a comprehensive, linked-to authority document on a brand or topic.

11. Made for AdSense (MFA) or Weak Affiliate Pages

Difficulty: (2/10)

As domain trust and on-page analysis (looking for affiliate code, link networks, 'quality score') becomes more advanced, pages that are highly commercialized - without a quality backlink profile to support them - tend to be rather wimpy.

12. Off-topic Pages

Difficulty: (2/10)

Pages that are completely focused on a subject (mentioning it in the title tag, headlines, and numerous times in the text) are typically much stronger than pages that just "randomly" mention a person or brand once down in the bottom. You can sometimes identify an off-topic page because the description will be pulled from the text and truncated with an ellipses ("..."). Creating your own page just about anywhere and optimizing it can often outrank off-topic page mentions.

13. Spam pages

Difficulty: (1/10)

There are thousands of automated bots scour the web, looking for fresh content to turn into a word salad of web spam for a quick buck. Sometimes they will "scrape" negative news items or headlines from the search results and re-display it. Random spam pages are typically the weakest of all web pages, and they can be overtaken by just about any other kind of web page.

What Do You Think?

These ratings are very rough estimates based on my own experience with reputation management campaigns. However, every single situation and search result page is different!

What kinds of search results have you found to be the most difficult to outrank?

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1. Before YouTube... there was "America's Funniest Home Videos"

This 90's television smash-hit, based on a Japanese show, kicked off user-generated video content in America. People submitted home videos of babies with nail guns, dogs on fire, and grandmas falling down, in hopes of winning a weekly cash prize.

2. Before Twitter... there was IRC.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a UNIX-based system of chat servers that was introduced in late 1988. A series of networks and thousands of channels allowed people to "tweet" about various topics, share cool links, and offer technical support. Twitter now offers a somewhat similar experience with a more user-friendly interface and mobile support.

3. Before blogs... there were 'zines.

image credit: Laughing Squid

If you wanted to delve in the world of personal publishing in the early 90's, it was pretty spendy. Desktop publishing with Adobe Pagemaker required investing big bucks into a high-end Mac and a state-of-the-art laser printer. Most young people stuck to cutting and pasting scraps onto blank paper and then xeroxing the final product.

4. Before podcasts... there were codelines.

image credit: Killbox

In the 90's, when digital voice mail was a cutting-edge corporate technology, there was a vibrant voice mail hacking scene. Phone phreaks from all over the United States would sequentially "scan" 1-800 exchanges for voice mail boxes (VMBs) and use default passwords to take over employees' (unused) voice mail boxes. They would record long informational greeting messages, known as "codelines." Codelines began with music and "shouts out" to other phone phreaks and then segued into first-generation "podcasts" packed with underground content: freshly hacked calling cards and credit cards, conference calls PINs, and global outdial passwords.

5. Before blogrolls and comments... there were web rings and guest books.

image credit: simon slade

Sites on similar subjects used link out to each other in a promotional circle jerk called a "web ring." Guestbooks used to be the hot way to leave comments, until bots were developed to harvest the e-mail addresses for the the worst kinds of spam imaginable.

6. Before Facebook... there was the 20th annual high school reunion.

image credit: Alan Light

You'd have to wait in 20 year increments – and buy a plane ticket – to catch up with many of your old friends or see their photo albums. Seriously.

7. Before Skype... there were k0dez and bridges.

Before VOIP and cell phone plans, it was rather expensive to make a long distance call. In some cases you'd pay over a dollar a minute (!) to "reach out and touch someone." The early-adopters (a.k.a. "phone phreaks") used home computer software to hack out calling card codes ("k0dez") to keep in touch. For teleconferencing, phreaks would hack out corporate phone systems' conferencing nodes, called "bridges." Epic rap sessions and knowledge downloads would go on for weeks... until the corporate host got a massive phone bill, found out, and shut it down. Check out these awesome vintage recordings.

8. Before eBay... there was the pawn shop.

image credit:Duien

Same questionable items, high fees and unsavory characters - but in an actual, real-life retail location!

9. Before the iPhone... there was the PayPhone.

Before technology allowed people to yak loudly on cellphones in restaurants, they had to go out to the payphone.

image credit:Aaroynx

And if they wanted to make a long distance call, they'd need an entire roll of quarters. The 90's equivalent of an "unlimited calling plan" was a toll-fraud device called a red box. Red boxes were modified Radio Shack touch-tone dialers that made the same sound a Bell payphone made when a quarter was inserted. By the end of the decade, Radio Shack had discontinued the device and Bell had upgraded to digital equipment. Thankfully, cellphones were becoming affordable, mainstream communications devices by then.

10. Before P2P file sharing... there was Columbia House Records.

image credit:joe madonna

Before DRM and iTunes - people downloaded music from Napster and burned it on a $569 external CD-R drive. Non-technical people who wanted free tracks got tempted by magazine ads that promised "Get 8 CD's for Just One Penny!" and they were unwittingly signed up for recurring CD subscriptions. Then they got slapped with a huge bill afterwards - the old-school equivalent of an RIAA settlement.

11. Before Craigslist... there was the men's room wall.

image credit: simon slade

Local newspapers would only publish "vanilla" dating ads. So, how did geeks and other shy people manage to hook up? The restroom wall, of course! Gay guys would post phone numbers and set meeting times for man-to-man encounters. Straight dudes would post the numbers of their ex's and innocent girls they wanted to harass.

12. Before Digg... there was your local newspaper's "Top Stories of the Year" issue.

You used to have to wait until December to find out hottest story of the year. And the news stories were picked by crusty old editors. Now there's an infinite stream of high-quality, uncensored content and entertainment - all just a mouse click away.

Isn't it great to be living in the 21st century?
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