Montreal SEO - Local Search Engine Optimization

by Montreal's SEO specialist, Gabriel Goldenberg aka Bookworm-SEO.

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Monday, December 04, 2006

Online Reputation Management: Viagra Spam hits US Colleges

Are you managing your company's online reputation? More specifically, are you managing its search engine reputation to prevent spammers and competitors hurting your brand? These schools didn't.

A variety of American colleges have recently had their sites hacked and are now ranking on Google's top 10 for the popular keyword phrase "buy viagra." Either out of greed or a sense of irony, the spammer also hit a religious order's site (highlighted in yellow). Click the image to enlarge it.

Reputation Management: Viagra Hits US Colleges

This raises two issues:

Having a secure site that can't be exploited by search engine spammers, and
Dominating the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your keywords, including obviously your company name and trademarks.

While I'm unfortunately not an expert on website and server security, I am an SEO specialist. So I can propose some solutions to the second problem.

First, a corporation (or school or anyone else for that matter) looking to control the first 10 spots for its company name should develop smaller sites. McDonald's kind of gets the idea (click to enlarge):

McDonald's Search Engine Reputation Management

You'll notice however that sites critical of McDonald's also show up for the search "McDonald's." Criticism is obviously necessary to a free society. But McDonald's could probably acknowledge the criticism while highlighting what it will change. So rather than have a site criticizing its attitudes towards animals, McDonald's could put out a press release acknowledging the problem and naming initiatives it will take to reform. Then, to get the press release ranking, it could link to it from its currently existing sites.

Another way to manage your search engine reputation would be to have employees blogging about work and about the company. Of course, like any other corporate blog, there might be a tendency to keep to the mundane. This is alright for a big company like McDonald's that can probably get any site ranking for its brand due to the strength of its main site and its other branch sites.

For a smaller company that doesn't already control a majority of its search engine reputation though, outside help will be necessary. That means that golden key of SEO: quality content. So the employee/blogger might discuss the work environment (again, legitimate criticism needs to be allowed). He/she can discuss the company's stock, which will likely earn some good links from economic blogs and finance blogging carnivals.

Note: It won't do any good if the blog is hosted on the same url as the main company site. The result then will just be to have several sub-listings like McDonald's does.

Some other ideas for dominating the SERPs include

starting a wiki for staff initiatives,
linking to charities your company supports so that they rank for your company's name (side-benefit of not just showing you in a neutral light but in a positive one),
public relations, whereby you get good [online] press and your company helps that page to rank high (news sites tend to rank well, making things easier).

I've got more ideas on online reputation management, but you'd have to hire me for that ;). If you found this post useful, take 30 seconds to subscribe to my free newsletter.

Related articles are archived in the topical categories Online reputation management, SEO tips, SEO News, SEO research.
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Online Reputation Management: Viagra Spam hits US Colleges posted by Bookworm SEO @ 7:16 PM

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