Reputation management and cleaning up bad search engine listings
Feb/093
This post is an outline of what i did with regards to one of the people that contacted me for reputation management.
Consider this Case Study 1 of a series of posts and i will keep posting different case studies every few weeks.
Over the last year or so i have had many people contact me to remove bad search engine listing and do some reputation management.
People ask me because they know i am good at it but i like to think they also ask me to remove them because i wont judge them and i just get on with the job in hand.
This is a topic that will get hotter as the social media and Facebook generation grow out of posting their every move on the internet and realise just how dangerous the information they provide is.
Just by scanning some twitter accounts and profiling a few random people you can see a time bomb ticking for them, especially when they link to all their profiles on social network sites.
Case Study 1.
Some of the most interesting reputation management projects i had was when one of the world richest people asked me to clean up the listing he had that detailed his “after work hobbies” and he wanted them to show his business interests and his charity work instead.
When i looked up his name he came impressively high in the top 1000 richest people.
He didn’t contact me personally but i did get to speak to him while i was doing some research part way through the project which was quite exciting.
After several discussions and lots of studying i worked out it was very possible to remove some of the listings and push the rest down the seeps by creating some sites about the positive parts of his life and business.
The first thing we did was created 20 content sites on domains between 10 and 14 years old which we picked up at auction.
We put static highly seo`d html pages on the front of the sites and blogs in folders as well to add lots of content quickly.
With the amount of financial power we had it took 3 full time writers and $40`000 of domains to clear the top 20 of the bad listings and replace them with positive listings.
The top 20 listing took us 11 weeks to clear up due to the power of the domains we bought as well as the quality and mainly quantity of content we were adding every few hours.
Once we had control of the top 20 listing the immediate pressure was off and we had to now start to remove and clean up anything futher down the listings.
The start of the removal was to just contact the people through their emails, messaging clients and through some social networks.
I used as many of my contacts as possible and if they knew the person that owned the site i asked for a favour and got them to contact the site owner for removal.
Many of the people that had written about the “after work activities” had no special feelings about their post and they werent getting much traffic for the keywords anyway so they were happy to delete the posts.
One or two of the lower down listing still looked bad and these were real jerk bloggers or forum owners that considered their readers liked thier integrity so they refused to remove them.
Strategy 1: Push down the listing
Strategy 2: Softly softly approach asking people nicely.
Strategy 3. Offer to advertise on the site in return for the removal of the blog or forum post.
Suddenly the people who refused to remove the posts because of their integrity decided they had very flexible morals and started trying to negotiate on price.
One of the forum owners wanted $3000 to remove a single post from a forum which was just rediculous.
Simple! find a moderator in the forum and offer them $200.
Worked a treat and the forum posts started disappearing very quickly when the cash was flowing.
Most of the results are cleared up and there are just a few blogger blogs now and the odd scraper sites that will just hopefully fade away with time.
Blogger is quite hard to clean bad posts off because there is often no way of contacting the owner and google wont remove them unless they have illegal content.
I could have got rid of all the scraper sites by contacting hosting companies but they rank so low in the listings and with the redirect to ppc that aren’t worth the trouble.
Thankfully we didn’t have to work on Strategy 4 because that’s when things start to get nasty.
You will get to see strategy 4 in Case Study 2 so don’t forget to add the feed to your reader.
Has anyone else ever done any reputation management for yourself or clients and were you successful?