First a quick rundown on both.

Negativiy Bias: It’s considered a psychological phenomenon. Researchers have found that our brains lean heavily toward the negative. If a person is given positive information about someone or something and an equally negative piece of information, their outlook on the subject will not be neutral, but will instead be negative. There was this study done on marriage where researchers found there needed to be five times as much positive feeling and interaction between husband and wife as there was negative for the marriage to remain stable. No one knows why this is… There are all sorts of theories out there. One is that it’s some sort of innate survival instinct- like prehistoric man saw an animal and immediately assumed it to be a threat instead of a friend. Better to be on the safe side.

Google Usage Data Algorithm: They may have another name for this at Google, but what I am referring to is the algorithm that ranks search results based on user activity. Basically, Google monitors user activity, such as individual users Googling “Cars,” clicking on a link to carreviews.com and staying there for a while. The theory is that this will cause carreviews.com to move higher in the search results. Of course that makes sense, but it doesn’t factor in the brain’s negativity bias. This is where things are getting messy in some search results.
So let’s use you for an example. You’re interested in having this company Pro Home Service fix your central air. So you Google “Pro Home Service” and quickly notice two links:

Pro Home Service a scam?
Pro Home Service specializes in affordable home service

You are going to click on the scam link, because it’s how your brain is wired. If our theory on how the Google Usage Data algorithm works is correct, then you just voted for this scam site to appear higher in Google under the brand name Pro Home Service. The problem is Pro Home Service is at the mercy of whoever posted the scam site. It could be a competitor, lead funnel, ad funnel, who knows…

For a few months I have been noticing people in really competitive niches starting to catch onto this. I saw this guy promoting some sort of MLM company. He was basically posting bio type info on all of these other companies in his niche but for the page title he put, “Is (Company Name) a scam?” All of his stuff is going to the top of Google results under these different brand names. I saw where someone else had posted, “How does his stuff rank so high?” Well, I’m 90% certain it’s this bad combination of negativity bias and Google usage data algorithm.

I ran my own test. I had five basic bio type articles written about one of our clients. Each was on a similar site, similar keyword usage in site, word count 240-260, similar backlinks, etc. But for one of the sites in the page title we put, “Is Companyname a scam?” Well, right now that one is #3 under their name. It’s above their linkedin, inc.com profile, facebook, yelp, and all sort of other major sites. Where are the other four? They aren’t even in the top 30.

I understand that Google is simply serving content that people want to see. But in this instance Google is not taking into account the fact that our brain is biased. Personally, I think this is definitely bad news for people and brands.

Hopefully they tweak this in the near future. Maybe they could create a list of sensationalistic words like scam, ripoff, wow and neutralize the ability of sites using those phrases to climb in search based on user activity.

Chris Martin
Founder of Repumatic
Founder of Reputation Hawk
Blogging @ Reputation.biz

It’s a simple Online Reputation Management technique for small businesses. You blast out your company info to local business directories like yellowpages, uscity, citysearch, angieslist, etc.

This will flood new positive/neutral sites into your Google results and may even help a little with lead generation. It’s also relatively cheap. There are many companies online that will manually submit your business informtion to a hundred or so local directories for a few hundred dollars.

So, why isn’t everyone doing this?

When it comes to your business there is an enormous difference between sites that you can control and sites that you cannot. We call these control sites and non-control sites. Control sites in your Google results are generally safe. Control sites are simply web sites that allow you to approve any content  that is published online about your business. Your twitter, FB, Google+ though social sites, would still be considered control sites.

Unfortunately most of the local directories fall into the non-control site category. There are different degrees of risk in non-control sites. There are a few great non-control sites that screen reviews and require verification that the poster is an actual customer/client of your company. However, these safer non-control sites are few and far between. Most non-control sites do not require any sort of verification and can put your brand in a very precarious position online.

This morning I randomly picked one non-control site which is a local business directory that is frequently submitted to in these local directory submission services.  I pulled up a local business listing and this is what I found,

I clicked on “Write a Review” to see if they had a verification process, but this is all of the information they needed.

Yes, anyone can post whatever they want to in those little white boxes and that is exactly why you should avoid local directories. The majority of them are simply high risk non-control sites. These sort of sites can be a playground for unethical competitors, disgruntled employees, that one crazy customer you have, etc.

We are currently working on an in depth list of safe non-control sites where you can submit your business information. When we have completed this data I will share it here. Until then I would avoid adding your business to random local directories.

Thanks for reading!

Chris Martin
Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz

What is so amazing about Linkedin right now?  Keep reading!

Most everyone is aware of the security breach at linkedin. If you are reading this and are unaware than in short someone hacked linkedin.com, exposed about 6M passwords, lots of media coverage, linkedin heightened security measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again, sent out press releases, etc, etc, etc.

Noone wants that sort of publicity and in actuality it could happen to any government or organization on the web. This is what is so incredible. So right now according to Google Trends 200,000+ people today Google’d “Linkedin”. Wow! Those are big numbers!

Now considering the mass amount of unwanted media coverage regarding the breach you would think these Googler’s are seeing an absolute mess when Googling “Linkedin” right? Wrong! It’s incredible. Check this out,

1-3 in Google under Linkedin

Linkedin.com at # 1, their wiki profile, and their app on the app store. Nice!

#4 in Google under “Linkedin”

This is usually when the news feed kicks in. Now things should surely start getting ugly right? NOPE! It’s all positive spins on the breach! Wow.

5-7 in Google under “Linkedin”

Now you definitely expect to find some negative media coverage, a lengthy post about the dangers of social media etc, right? NOPE! It’s their Twitter, Crunchbase profile, and their app page on Android. WOW.

8-10 in Google under “Linkedin”

Now you think this is impossible and the front page is going to get ugly at least toward the bottom, right? NOPE! It starts with this polite looking lady with an article on how to use Linkedin, moves onto their Mashable profile and then a profile on Yahoo Finance!

Absolutely fascinating! Where is the Google Freshness Algorithm? It doesn’t seem to have affected this search at all! Why?

I just checked and there are backlinks pointing to Mrs. Doyle’s linkedin how to article from 2009! This article on about.com has been online for years! Right now Linkedin has massive amounts of fresh publicity on hundreds of major media outlets. So naturally you would think  the Google Freshness Algorithms would be picking up on this content and covering the front page like we see here But as we can see, the Linkedin search results are perfectly fine.

So what can we learn here? Evidently not every company/person is at the mercy of Google Freshness Algorithms in the midst of an intense and unwanted media storm. The Google news snippet section of the front page is the only area that covered the breach. I would say it’s safe to assume that in a few weeks there will be no mentioning of the breach at all in the top 20 when Googling “Linkedin”. Even now the majority of the unwanted press is page 3 or lower in Google (outside of the top 20).

From an ORM perspective this is quite fascinating and there is an absolute wealth of information right now in Linkedin’s search results. In my experience you learn so much more about Google in cases like this than typical SEO related news/rumors.

Unfortunately at this time there are more questions than answers in this post. There are some things I do not understand at all like how the about.com article from 2009 is still on page 1 while fresh content on sites like CNN.com and a plethora of others is in the supplemental results. This does not coincide at all with my understanding of the Google Freshness Algorithm. I’m still digesting this and will be for quite some time. If you are involved in ORM you may want to Google “Linkedin” and save the top 100 for research purposes.

Thanks for reading!

Chris Martin
Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

The other day I took my wife’s car to the shop because it had an oil leak. So first I went to Google to find the dealership that was closest to me.

There was one within a 5 minute drive and the other would easily take 20-25 minutes to reach. The problem is the one right next to us had 12 Google reviews and most of those reviews were all terrible.

Here are a few quotes,

“They will %&$^ your car up to no end.”

“I went and picked it up my car and brought it to someone who has a concept of time.”

“DO NOT GO HERE!!!!!”

“The repair shop is a joke on all levels.”

Seems like it would make sense to avoid this place right? The problem is we have two toddlers and an infant and everyone in my shoes knows the extra 20 minute drive is a big deal. So, I decided to take my chances.

I pick up our car the next day expecting a tire to fall off on the way home. That didn’t happen, but here is what did;

- They were super polite.

- The service guy called me asking if we had an extended warranty. I couldn’t remember (too much going on in my brain) so he said if it was okay with me he would dig through the car and try to find the paperwork. He found it and everything was covered.

- When I picked up our car they were again super polite and everything was fixed perfectly.

- They washed and vacuumed our car almost to the point of it appearing brand new.

This experience made me wonder. I calculated that these guys average between 40,000 – 50,000 customers a year. All of those customers and there are only 12 Google reviews many of which paint a very negative picture of their service. That struck me as fundamentally unfair and I think anyone would see it as off balance. So, I started thinking about Negativity Bias on the ride home.

Negativity Bias is considered a psychological phenomenon.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

Check out these two bullet points from Negativity Bias in Wiki,

** If a person has a good experience and a bad experience close together, they will feel worse than neutral. This is true even if they would independently judge the two experiences to be of similar magnitude.

** When given a piece of positive information and a piece of negative information about a stranger, people’s judgment of the stranger will be negative, rather than neutral (assuming the two pieces of information are not severely imbalanced).

This is article in Psychology Today discussed negativity bias in the framework of a marriage,

“Because of the disproportionate weight of the negative, balance does not mean a 50-50 equilibrium. Researchers have carefully charted the amount of time couples spend fighting vs. interacting positively. And they have found that a very specific ratio exists between the amount of positivity and negativity required to make married life satisfying to both partners.

That magic ratio is five to one. As long as there was five times as much positive feeling and interaction between husband and wife as there was negative, researchers found, the marriage was likely to be stable over time. In contrast, those couples who were heading for divorce were doing far too little on the positive side to compensate for the growing negativity between them.”

You can’t help but wonder if this can translate to customer experience. Does your customer have to have 5 times the positive experiences with your company to outweigh the negative? Even so, the data I am looking at would suggest the 5 to 1 ratio would only bring the customer to a neutral outlook on your product or service.

So here we have a force like the internet that has created a simple, global stage to post anonymous reviews about people and companies. We now combine that with the pyscological phenomon of negativity bias which according to most studies affects the masses.

Do you see the need for Online Reputation Management?

Chris Martin
Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

This is just an FYI for those who are considering submitting a copyright removal request to Google. 

It’s an easy thing to do and takes less than two minutes. Naturally people tend to have this, “It’s simple and worth a shot” mentality. Keep in mind Google will only remove the content based on proof of an actual copyright violation (DMCA). There is no reason to submit a removal request based on defamation to Google. It will just waste two minutes of your time and two minutes of Google’s time.

Let’s say you do however have a case of copyright infringement. Is this a quick and easy fix? Yes, technically it is. But, there is however the possibility of backlash.

Currently, any time you submit a DMCA notice to Google the notice is made public on chillingeffects.org  You can read up on chillingeffects here, it’s basically a nonprofit geared toward protecting anonymous free speech on the internet among other things.  When you submit your DMCA request to Google, chillingeffects will publish the notice. They will hide your personal details in the letter but include your company name (copyright owner) and the name of the company who submitted the request.

Here is the potential online backlash,

- The DMCA notice could appear in your company’s search results.

- Depending on your situation this could birth new cases of unwanted publicity under your name or your company name.

- If the listing is removed from Google this will appear in it’s place,

In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.

I’m definitely not saying you shouldn’t submit a DMCA notice to Google, I’m just saying there is a bit more to it then filling out this quick form and going along your merry way. Every situation is unique and you need to weigh the probability of backlash in your situation before submitting a Copyright Infringement notice.

Also check out this link - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/transparency-for-copyright-removals-in.html

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

Reputation Defined

1) The beliefs or opinions that are generally held about someone or something.
2) A widespread belief that someone or something has a particular habit or characteristic.

From Wikipedia,

“Reputation is a fundamental instrument of social order, based upon distributed, spontaneous social control.”

In 1994 you probably had a local reputation unless you auditioned on Star Search. The beliefs and opinions about you as an individual were for the most part shaped by those you encountered directly or indirectly.

In 1995 NSFNET was decommissioned and the commercialization of the Internet began. This launched your shift from a local reputation to a global reputation.

It took roughly 10 years for companies to figure out the best way to index all of the information on the internet. It started with Directories and quickly morphed into search engines. Around 2005, Google Base launched and over the next few years became the dominant search engine on the internet. Fast forward to 2012 and there are 10 billion web pages on the internet and traffic worldwide is now measured in monthly Exabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).

This is the backbone of your global reputation and it means that billions of people on the planet have instant access to information about you.

Today, someone on the other side of the world can get a quick glimpse into your involvements and possibly details about your personal life in less than 60 seconds. That same person can post information about you at their sole discretion in less than 180 seconds. Compare this to 18th century England where cases of Defamation were rare and limited to information that was published in the local newspaper.

So where does your global reputation start?

Googling people, places, businesses, is a phenomena that is only growing stronger and becoming more ingrained in the lives of everyday people.

It may not always be Google, but it definitely could be. The market share of the Silicon Valley company is mind boggling.

Given this major revolution in Reputation it’s a good idea to become acquainted with your Google results. Right now you have a bit of a head start. In five years there could easily be thousands of web sites that are posting mass amounts of data all trying to occupy the front page of your search results to get an extra slice of ad revenue.

I’m plugging one of our tools here but it fits – Check out Repumatic, it’s free. Even if you don’t want the CORE sites that Repumatic creates for you in your top 10, use them to link to your social profiles which will push them higher in Google and give them more staying power.

So if you are reading this than you probably live in a modern society and therefore you have a Global Reputation. There’s no reason to let that fact freak you out, it’s something we are all adapting to. Fortunately there are some really cool tools out there to put you in control of the process.

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

So you have this web site toward the top of your search results that displays a little row of gold and white stars. Unfortunately your company’s listing has two gold stars and three white stars. This isn’t good. Maybe it’s due to poor customer experience or maybe it’s a competitor posting fake reviews, could be both… So, what do you do?

If you look online every company seems to have the same answer – post positive reviews. I even noticed one company advertising a service where they send your customers a feedback form that is designed to psychologically persuade the customer to post a positive review. Seriously! That’s how they actually advertise it. How is that even possible? Is it like,

Question # 4
How would such a beautiful and intelligent person like yourself rate your overall positive experience with our company?

Strange stuff out there… I digress. So, maybe that is the case and you need to figure out creative ways to get more positive reviews posted on these sites. That’s fine just remember this one important tidbit. Google has a freshness algorithm that is basically like, “mmmm yummm Fresh content… You move higher… I like you.”

So each time you post a positive review on a web site whether it’s yelp, trip advisor, yahoo reviews, etc it’s like throwing a rock into a pile. There are some rough, ugly rocks in that pile so you decide to have some customers toss in some nice polished ones. That’s good and all but sooner or later there will be so many rocks in that pile it’s there to stay.

Staying Power!

Got it? It’s an ORM term. When you post reviews you increase that web site’s staying power in Google under your company name. In my opinion, unless it’s Google reviews, try to get that site out of your top 20 and it will be one less thing to worry about.

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

Most everyone is now aware of the news at JP Morgan and the fallout from the 2B trading loss. It would be really informative to take the name of a high profile individual involved in that fallout and monitor their search movement. This is not an Online Reputation Management case study where I show the user how our tools and services can be used to clean up search results but more of a look into how Google is currently ranking sites under a key phrase that is getting a massive amount of unwanted buzz.

Ina Drew

Let’s go ahead and take a quick look at her top 10 in Google. The first thing we notice is Facebook, Linkedin, and her bio on jpmorganchase.com, were all pushed out literally overnight. This is notable considering those sites in most cases have a tendancy to rank on page 1 in Google and stay there.

So the entire front page in Google is covering the 2B Trading Loss. This does seem a bit lopsided as every link is someone’s coverage on the exact same event. People who have already read the news and are Googling her for information like Resume, Salary, etc will get frustrated with these search results. This relates to Google’s Freshness algorithm which the engineers at Google are constantly tweaking so we could see a more balanced return in cases like this in the future.

This is a perfect example of why individuals, especially high profile individual’s should register a dot com under their name (inadrew.com) and setup a blog on it. The dot com should move to # 1 in Google under the person’s name within six months and most likely stay there even in a case like this.  Ina Drew would only need to write a quick post detailing her side of the story that would instantly reach all of these people Googling her. At this point it is much more difficult for her voice to be heard over this amount of media coverage.

Can she shape her search result right now?

Only at a very minimum level. Let’s say she does have a desire to post her side of the story to provide a more balanced view in her search results. An ORM company could help setup her dot com and work on moving this content to page 1 in Google. At best she could probably hope for 2-3 of these sites on her front page within a few weeks. This is mainly due to the amount of unwanted press coverage in this case.

In this situation from an Online Reputation Management perspective the typical protocol would be,

1) Wait out the Storm (While waiting you can have your dotcom setup to tell your side of the story if you think it is necessary.)
2) In a few months these sites will lose the boost they are receiving in Google’s Freshness algorithm.
3) Have an ORM company start building links to sites you approve of under your name while creating new content on your current initiatives.

After a few months have passed the search results will still be difficult to shape but it will at least be plausible.

A few things we can glean from these search results,

1) High profile individuals need to setup a dot com and make sure it’s # 1 under their name in search engines like Google.
2) Strong profile sites in Google will fall out of the search results quickly  under mass amounts of media coverage.
3) The Freshness algorithm in Google can quickly overide QDD (Query Deserves Diversity) algorithm in Google.

I will wait to post on her search results again until I see major movement in Google.

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

<TITLE>Page Title Here</TITLE>

So Google reads this and places your page title here,

Now I want to show you something right quick. Let’s take a look at the front page of Google for, “SEO Software”. Is that a keyword that alot of people want to rank for? Definitely. So in the results below how many web sites have used “SEO Software” in their page title and nothing more?

There is not a single site that just uses the keyphrase “SEO Services” for their page title. So, in your ORM campaign if you are trying to shape the search results under the keyword, “John Smith Atlanta” you don’t want to create 20 web sites and give them all the title “Jon Smith Atlanta”. It’s just going to look like Spam to Google and they will all have a difficult time ranking. So make sure to mix it up, John Smith living in Atlanta, John Smith playing at Jazzland in Georgia, John Smith was born in Atlanta GA, etc.

We are trying to structure Repumatic in a way that makes it very difficult for someone to make common mistakes like this. For example we have this script that automatically changes the meta title to the users post title. Rarely will someone write a post and title it a keyphrase. It seems to be working well so far.

That’s it for today have a great weekend!

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

What an insane age we are in now. Everything’s cool and we have all this data at our fingertips but the whole time this massive thing we call the Internet is collecting and collecting and collecting more data.

So, here we have this song. Do you think her Grandkids will see this video? Oh yea, and so will their grandkids, and their grandkids, and their grandkids, and their grandkids. Forever. Data is eternal. It doesn’t get old and die like we do. Of course when the world ends so does all this data but  who knows, by that time we may be storing data in space.

So maybe some would look at this video and be like, “Man, bad news for her”. But not so fast. We are all in the same boat. Someone could call you a liar and a thief and that web page could still be found somewhere on the internet in a 1,000 years.

So, where am I going with this? I’m trying to figure that out while I type.

So, let’s say Rebecca Black instead lived a 100 years ago in like this Little House on the Prairie type environment. she and some friends were really excited about getting out of school for the weekend and created this song called, “Friday”.

They performed it on Friday in front of a classroom filled with about 10 kids. A couple of the kids liked it, but most laughed. There was some talk for a few weeks about it but the gossip all died down, even to the point where it was no longer remembered.

But in 2012 it ends up getting viewed by 100 million + people  and will now be sitting on servers all over the world until the end of time. Kind of creepy when you really think about it…

That’s  the internet. It’s entirely based on Adding and Storing information, perpetually.

So you should all be deeply concerned about your online reputation MUHAAHAHA.

Sorry, had to throw that one in there for the fun of it. I’m just saying that we do need to be careful about what we post online. Little Willy may be reading it in 3514. It’s also a good idea to begin taking steps to protect your online reputation if you have not already. You can’t control other people, and other people can say whatever they want to about you online. So, your online rep really isn’t something you want to ignore.  There are alot of services and tools out there to help you expedite the online reputation protecton process.

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

Probably not.

It would make sense for ORM to reflect the same industry trends as it’s close counterpart – SEO. So what happened with SEO or Search Engine Optimization. What niche identifying phrase stuck?

Let’s take a look at some quick data.

Here we see Google usage date for the keyword “Search Engine Optimization” from 2004 to present.  Of course we all know that this industry has continued to grow over the last 10 years but this chart sure doesn’t show it. Now let’s compare the usage of SEO and Search Engine Optimiation. Check out the new red line,

People by nature want to talk/type less so naturally the masses went with SEO by habit. Some may argue that ORM on the other hand is an acronym for multiple industries. True, but so is (or kind of was) SEO – Synthetic Engine Oil, Survival Enhancement Options, State Electoral Office, etc. But now when you type in “SEO” search engines universally understand that there is a 99.9% chance you mean Search Engine Optimization and not Survival Enhancement Options.

ORM is a popular acronym for Object Relational Mapping. I don’t know much about it but evidently it’s been on a bit of a nose dive,

Now lets look at Online Reputation Management compared with Object Relational Mapping.

Basically looks like one phrase is growing in use and the other is in decline for whatever reason. Object Relational Mapping powered almost all of the usage of the term ORM In 2003 – 2007. Interestingly the use of the term ORM has not plunged like the use of Object Relational Mapping.

This leads me to believe that people started Googling “ORM” meaning “Online Reputation Management” which caused the usage of “ORM” to stay fairly steady. However, the search engines have been a little slow to adpt to this and still predominately return sites that are mainly related to other uses of the term ORM.

I think within 12 months we will probably see a big shift in those search results. By 2015, maybe sooner, I bet everyone refers to this industry simply as ORM.

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

1) You have a writer on staff go to the client’s web site and learn about their business. You then instruct the writer to write X number of articles per month on the client.

2) The unique articles get routed to your programming team who uploads them to unique web sites on unique hosts. These sites may be pat of a large network of sites owned by the ORM company or setup on new domains.

3) The new sites are sent to the link building team who then builds links pointing to the new web sites on a recurring basis. This step is crucial for faster indexing by Google and higher rankings.

This is your basic ORM process. It definitely works… Some clients have to be more patient than others but this process repeated on a recurring basis will suppress unwanted publicity in the search results.

Steps 2 and 3 will always be crucial unless search engines like Google go crazy with their algorithm updates. If that does happen than it’s just a matter of adapting those techniques to the algorithm movement.

Step 1 though can be greatly improved upon if the client is willing to spend a bit more time and effort on their ORM campaign. Writing numerous bios is fine but the drawback is your search results get filled with alot of sites that say pretty much the same thing.

In Repumatic and our High End Reputation Hawk campaigns we are trying to move away from the bio model all together. For example in Repumatic Nonprofit, a network of charity themed web sites are created for the client on domains like charityreport, charitypromo, charitynews, charityinsights, etc. The idea here is to post about promos and discounts on one of the sites, PR on another site, industry insights on the charityinsights site, etc. This type of content will effectively promote the nonprofit and they can even inserts keyword links on their new sites leading to their dot org that will move their site higher in search engines (SEO).

This should culminate in search results that the user finds very useful and informative. This makes the user happy and search engines like Google happy. This process should also result in protected search results, improved rankings for your web sites in search engines, and a greatly improved customer acquisition process when potential clients Google the name of you or your company.

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

Okay, so keyword Identification is an extremely crucial element to ORM. You need to know what keywords people are typing in to search for you or your business. If you don’t know than you can only guess. So, here are two quick ways to help you identify your keywords.

Step 1) Pull up this Google Keyword Tool. Make sure to uncheck the default box on the left hand side that says “Broad”. If not you are going to freak out a little bit and think thousands of people are searching for you. So instead click on the “Exact Match” check box. This is like telling Google you want to know how many people are searching specifically for “Atlanta Georgia”, not people searching for Atlanta, Macon Georgia, Georgia Mountains, Georgia on my mind lyrics, etc which is Broad match.

Step 2) Go to google.com and type in your name or your company name and you will see Google start autofilling search suggestions. These are keywords people have searched in the past.

There are alot of other tools out there, some paid and some free. But I have found these two steps to be the most expedient and accurate.

Now simply create a list of your top 5 or 10 key phrases and rank them in order of importance. Save it! That’s good data.

If you are concerned about your business 9 times out of 10 your most searched phrase will simply be the name of your business. You will probably have additional keywords like review, news, contact, locations, support, scam, etc. The Scam keyword does not mean people necessarily think your business is a scam. It’s actually becoming a common search keyword for people looking specifically for negative publicity under the name of a person or company.

Have a great weekend!

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

Diversion Campaigns are rare but nevertheless interesting. This is usually how a diversion campaign is born,

1. Someone posted something about you or a family member that you consider to be private.
2. You were unsuccessful in having the private content removed through typical avenues like DMCA notices.
3. You do not want to create new, factual content about yourself or the family member to suppress the unwanted web site in the search results.

In this situation a diversion campaign is probably your only option. So, here is an example,

- Your personal cell # is all over the frontpage of your search results on different sites. You decide to flood the internet with combinations of your name and hundreds of different phone numbers. This will likely cause anyone trying to get your # to become agitated, confused, and move on.

You get the idea… It’s typically a campaign designed to confuse people who are trying to access your private information online. For the most part I would say they are fairly rare. Before you launch a diversion campaign you should really exhaust all avenues in having the content removed. Repumatic contains some free guides that will help in removing private information from the net.

You can actually send in a request to Google to have private information removed from their search results. Unfortunately, that only works if the offending site has posted your  social security number, credit card number, copy of signature, that sort of thing. You can check it out here - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164133

There are also some tools out there that are either free or inexpensive that aid in removing private information from the web. From what I remember Reputation.com has a product that is geared toward online privacy.

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

 

To an extent! When you have no way to approve or deny the comments in your search results than they are your worst enemy. Remember, lots and lots and lots of web sites out there would love to rank high under your name or the name of your business. Why? Because all web site want one thing – traffic.

Traffic typically equals Money in one way or another.

So let’s say I want to grab my share of traffic under your personal name, let’s call you Dexter Migosh. So I have this web site called peoplefindergalaxyworld.com or something and create a web page on that site that says, “Looking for Dexter Migosh?” Great! Here is some public information about Dexter Migosh.

Now, I need to invite user comments. If people comment on the page than that can definitely  play a factor in my web page moving higher in search engines like Google under, “Dexter Migosh”, which as we know means more traffic. Now someone who hates Dexter decides to Google him, clicks on the link to peoplefindergalaxyworld.com and bashes him in the comment section of the web site.

A search engine spider revists the page and probably thinks to itself something like this, “hmm there is some new stuff here on Dexter and evidently people like to read it. After all they are clicking on it and staying there for a while. This page deserves a push up the ranks into the top 3 under Dexter Migosh.”

So, what can Dexter do? He can reply to the comment which will help peoplefindergalaxyworld.com rank even higher under his name! The web site is happy because now they are getting lots of traffic! People who are searching online for Dexter and even Dexter himself went to that site twenty times last month because he is worried more people will post. If your the the owner of peoplefindergalaxyworld.com and you setup pages like this for a million people then you have some serious traffic on your hands. The other happy party is Dexter’s hater because his or her comments are front and center for the world to see when people search for, “Dexter Migosh”.

Seem a little unfair if you are Dexter? Kind of has multiple forces working against him here wouldn’t you say?

So…. Here is we are going to use this to your benefit with Repumatic. As you may know by now Repumatic automatically creates a network of 10 sites under your name or your business (expandable to 20) that you fully control trough one simple window. We are working on the ability for Repumatic users to enable commenting on all of the sites in their network. But! Here is the major difference. You have control. So, somebody goes to one of these sites and has something to say about you than you have the ability to approve or deny those comments. This way you still reap the benefits of your sites improving in rank due to commenting, but avoid the major dangers.

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com

Well… really powerful in some cases and not so much in others. Let’s say you have a site appearing at # 8 in your search results that shows the exact location of the silver you hid in your backyard. You tried contacting them to have it removed but the site is on a server somewhere in Hong King and the odds off your complaint even being read is probably 1 in a 1,000. So, you want it out of your top 20 or 30 results in Google and have to take matters into your own hands. This would be relatively easy and free with a tool like Repumatic but let’s say you are really paranoid and don’t want to create an account on Repumatic or hire an ORM company. It freaks you out.

Alright so, a key thing to remember is links are like votes. Google see links pointing to your positive web sites and the big G is like, “hey this web site (your positive one) must be relative for this term (your link text), maybe I should move this web page higher in our search results when someone types that term (your name or company name) into our search box”. That’s definitely over simplification but it will work for the purpose of this post.

Technically you could open up a word doc and start your own link building campaign. You go through your top 30 in Google and make a list of all the URLs (ie www.linkedin.com/user/james) that you like. Then you need to hire a company to build links around the internet pointing to that list of URLs. It will probably cost a few hundred dollars and take less than a month.

This only works with really simple cases like the one described above. In reality you should want to create new content that you have control of in your search results. The concept of Repumatic is to put multiple sites that you have full control of into prominent positions in your search results while giving you the ability to manage that network of sites through one central control panel. So, when someone does say something crazy about you or posts your SS# online you have a buffer of strong sites in your top 20 and hopefully the unwanted new content will not even make it into your first 2 pages in Google (where 99% of users stay. In a weird way this industry is built on a lazy habit – 99% ish of people do not go pass the first two pages of search results.).

Founder of Reputation Hawk
Creator of Repumatic
Blogging @ Reputation.biz
Have a question? Check out ormforum.com