When negative or unflattering information about you or your company appears in the search engines, it’s easy to panic. But before you rush to make a slew of new pages and profiles, you should be aware there is a more effective and natural-looking strategy: linking to existing pages about other people with the exact same name.
There are more people than names in the world. There’s a few different guys with my not-so-common name. Same thing with company names… here are two company names I just made up: Matrix Marketing and Paradigm Plumbing. Google says there are multiple firms operating under these names
You can often find strong pages owned by people or companies with the same name as yours – and then build links to those pages to help camouflage the undesired search result. This usually works fast because the existing pages are old and already somewhat “trusted” by the search engines – and it looks extremely natural to human searchers, also.
The ideal page to “build up” has many of the following characteristics:
- It’s on a strong trusted domain (.edu / .gov is great)
- Your name is in the title tag.
- Your name is used in an HTML headline.
- Your name is used several times in the body copy of the page.
- The page has some toolbar PageRank.
- The page ranks in the top 100 for your name.
- The page has few or no links pointing to it.
Why do you want a page with few links pointing to it? Because, most often, these “neglected” pages will rise in rank quickly with just a little bit of links.
How do you check if the page has any links pointing to it? Just go to Yahoo and type in “link:www.example.com/example.html” and see what it shows. Better yet, install the Firefox plugins SEOpen or SEO for Firefox.
Then you can use advanced Google queries to help you find pages that meet the rest of the criteria:
Find all pages with your full name listed anywhere:
“Bob Smith”
Find pages with your full name listed in the title tag:
allintitle: Bob Smith
Find pages on CNN.com with your full name listed anywhere:
“Bob Smith” site:cnn.com
Find pages on .EDU sites with your full name listed anywhere:
“Bob Smith” site:.edu
Find pages on .GOV sites with your full name listed anywhere:
“Bob Smith” site:.gov
Find pages on .MIL sites with your full name listed anywhere:
“Bob Smith” site:.mil
Find pages with your name in the title tag, on .EDU sites:
allintitle: Bob Smith site:.edu
Find a strong page that meets most of the criteria and make sure it looks like a permanent page that is unlikely to change. Don’t choose a college senior quarterback’s page that will get deleted in 6 months, or a wiki that can be edited by anyone – because the downside of this technique is that you don’t have any control over the page.
Then, build a couple of good links to it –– slowly — using variations of your name as the anchor text (Bob Smith, Mr. Smith, Bob).
If you choose well and link smartly, it can outrank negative information quickly and it will look more authentic than an obvious overload of Naymz and Myspace profiles.
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