Some online reputation repair campaigns are relatively easy. You build great pages and get links from good neighborhoods and the “bad” content slowly washes away.
Other times, it is maddeningly difficult. Seeming impossible.
Google’s will find a third-rate slander page (with 1995 design and sloppy writing) and seemingly weld it to #3. You can rank content above or below it, and Google won’t budge the negative listing from its place. The normal laws of SEO don’t apply…
A stubborn listing that won’t budge from the front page, no matter what. image: Semaforo
SEO Rand Fishkin blogged about this phenomena a few months back and asked if a “Query Deserves Diversity” algorithm exists at Google? I have observed this phenomena firsthand, and I agree that it exists.
How Diversity Helps Search Engine Users
Diversified search results help the end user to quickly find the tone or “flavor” of content they are looking for.
Say someone is searching for “alcohol” – it would be ideal to serve up a mixed brew: the Wikipedia entry on “alcohol (solvent),” the Bacardi liquor page, and then the Mothers Against Drunk Driving “Alcohol Abuse Facts” page. Same thing with a search like “Scientology.” It would benefit searchers to display the organization’s official site and also a popular Scientology critic site near the top – so people can get a balanced picture, quickly.
How The Diversity Algorithm Can Destroy Reputations
If someone publishes a defamatory page and it gets included as a diversity result by Google, it can make a nearly indelible mark against your reputation.
Google’s semantic analysis algorithms appear to identify when a page is negative, or “against” a certain topic or keyphrase, by using on-page text and link anchor text. Some suspected trigger words I have noticed before are things like are “anti” (as in Anti-PayPal site) and “sucks.” Googlebot determines that this page is the most relevant negative page, and it pushes it up onto the front page and locks it there until another, stronger semantically negative page comes along.
If a site displays sitelinks for a negative search phrase (i.e. “PayPal sucks”) – it’s a sign that Google recognizes and “trusts” the site:
Negative sites with sitelinks can be among the most difficult to suppress.
In June, I had the chance to ask Google search engineers about the diversity algorithm. In their non-committal “politician” way of answering things, they alluded that there is some kind of algorithmic tendency designed to serve up a wide range of results. They are aware it can have intense negative consequences on companies and individuals, so a Googler was looking at algorithmic ways to make some defamatory information rank less prominently. They stressed that these “softening” algorithms weren’t yet in use at Google, but they “might someday” be.
Until then, here are some possible ideas on how you can deal with Google’s diversity algorithm:
- Think outside the box. When conventional reputation management techniques aren’t gonna work, get creative. Think beyond conventional internet marketing. Think about social engineering and psychology. Don’t spend money on links or waste your time fighting a impossible battle. Instead… think of ways you can buy the site, pull the plug on the post, or pull some strings to awaken a change in the webmaster’s heart.
- Make your own negative page first. If you are involved in a business venture that is bound to attract controversy, be sure and register you own “…sucks.com” – and do it under an anonymous name and host it on a different IP block than your main websites. (If you host and register it with the same info, Google will know it is yours.) You can use words link “scam,” “sucks” and “anti-” in a tongue-in-cheek way. That way you own the first “negative” page – and you control it.
This is a “fake” negative page about MLM. It is actually designed to promote MLM and generate leads.
Hardcore, Bonus Tip:
Richard Zwicky’s presentation in “The Best Kept Secrets in Search” at SES San Jose has some very hardcore tactics to frame negative domains and “hijack” them straight out of the search index. We don’t use these kind of techniques, and if you do, you could run into legal problems or Google problems… so explore at your own risk!
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