Author: Will Scott

What on earth does Swine Insemination have to do with SEO?

This is a funny story and turned out to be a pretty good example of what reputation management, as I understand it, is all about.
Now, keep in mind there are people who focus on reputation management. We dabble.

I would define reputation management (online) as assuring that the most positive message about you or your company is the one with top ranking for any given relevant phrase. Relevant phrases might include your name, your brands, your corporate officers or any phrase for which you would naturally have a vested interest.Often, given the high degree of vitriolic speech on the web a company can find itself maligned by a blogger or commentator, who by virtue of their online reputation (authority), winds up ranking for the business name or the name of one of the principals of the company.

For example — I’m not arrogant enough to think we had an impact on a successful venture backed company like Yodle (formerly natpal) — but, a blog post I wrote about what I thought were very dangerous SEO practices a while back managed to rank well for the word “Natpal”. As it turns out, Natpal shortly thereafter ended this dangerous practice and I gave kudos to their CEO Court Cunningham.

The episode demonstrates the concern though. What if some blogger or yelper decides to speak negatively about you and then obtains ranking? The squawking can, if you’re not careful drown out your message.

“OK, cool” you say but what does this have to do with Swine Insemination? I’ll get to that.

For example, we were recently approached by a New Orleans financial startup who on searching for their name (a brand new domain) found that one of their competitors was on page one and they were nowhere.

Thankfully their business name wasn’t something like Free Coupons, but was instead a much less searched for phrase.

The good news was that they did have some presence. They’d been running some ads on local job boards and they’d gotten included in some local press so they were at lease known, if not yet visible to the big G.

What we did was pretty simple. Something I like to call authority borrowing (people less nice than me call it “Parasite SEO”). My mother tells me no one who’s not in the business of website promotion will know what I mean by authority so in brief: Authority is your reputation with the search engines. There are lots of factors but sum it up to say it’s an indication of how much the search engines trust you.

So basically, if you have a brand new site and you don’t own a 100% search phrase matched non-hyphenated .com domain, you’re hosed.

As I said, the good news is that the search phrase wasn’t super-competitive. So our job in knocking brand-X off page 1 was that much easier. Other good news was that we happen to have control over a locally relevant directory 🙂

So to the details:

1. We put a listing for our client company in our own New Orleans business directory.
2. We built them a Craig’s List “Local Business Ad” (free and very effective but transient – in other words they’re not good for long). The secondary benefit of this is that Craig’s list has a TON of authority and so the link back has a lot of weight.
3. We submitted their site, our Buy Local Buy NOLA listing, the Craig’s list ad and some of their other press to a number of social media sites and directories.

Blammo! That was all it took. Within 48 hours, brand-X was off the home page and we controlled 9 of 10 remaining listings.

To this day, relevant sites still control 7 of 10 – brand-X is buying adwords against a phrase they used to rank for and we only just lost the #1 spot because their exact match domain seems to have changed hands and the new owners switched it to an SEO savvy host.

I guess our guys should have signed up for a longer term engagement ;>

Finally, Swine Insemination.

OK, OK here’s where the swine insemination part comes in. I was talking about all this with a friend of mine who does web design for plastic surgeons and others. She on a lark decided to put our business name “Search Influence” into Google to see what came… well, there in the #5 position was some site talking about Swine Insemination.

So I decided if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. OK, not really. My piggish behavior tapered off toward the end of my twenties.

Really though I thought it was a great example of the point I’d just been making (and which I’ve spent the last few minutes writing up.

The last thing you want when someone goes searching for you is negativity. You want sweetness and light above the fold. And, great news, you can control it.

Your name is likely not a heavily searched phrase – you should own it (unless of course you’re named Will Scott, then you’re probably out of luck).

And honestly, I’d rather see Swine Insemination or a competitor’s name than mine smeared.

And I think you would too.

P.S. If you want to know the name of the company for whom we did that, call or email.

References

Some of the better known authorities with some great information on reputation management in general are:

• Marketing Pilgrim Andy Beal
• Search Engine Guide’s Jennifer Laycock (please don’t tell my wife I’m linking to her again)
• Stuntdubl – Todd Malicoat
• Distilled (A UK Search Marketing Firm)

Media References:

• Washington Post “Calling in Pros to Refine Your Google Image“
• Wall Street Journal “Firms Tidy Up Clients’ Bad Online Reputations“
• American Venture “Online Reputation Management”

Renting VS Owning

I’m writing to give praise to Court Cunningham.

Court Cunningham, the CEO of NatPal, has been incredibly quick in responding to my earlier post in which I was critical of NatPal’s handling of mirror sites.

He indicates in his comment that they are also being quick to address the problem noted.

You may read his comment here.

Mr. Cunningham, well done sir.

First, let me apologize for the rant which follows.

Good – that’s out of the way. Stick with me and it’ll be worth your time.

“Natpal” offers “Local Search Advertising”.

So do a number of other search marketing aggregators. They’re not all the same even though on the surface they offer similar products.

The keys, as pointed out by Greg Sterling are a sales channel and an aggregated online advertising buy. Additional commentary from Greg on Natpal.

As some of you may know I have a pretty deep experience in the online yellow pages industry.

From that time I have some experience with each of those listed by Greg above some of which is good. For instance:

• ReachLocal – offers a real service. I would contend the same value can be delivered at a lower cost, but with their independent rep network and some nice lead tracking technology they do provide some value.
• WebVisible – works primarily through existing sales channels such as yellow pages and newspapers. I like and have a lot of respect for Terry and Kirsten.
• WebListic – offers local search engine marketing and is a creation of one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known when it comes to local online advertising, Dick Larkin.

There are others about which I’m indifferent, some of whom I know from prior dealings to be a little weak and at least one who in my recent experience has demonstrated downright destructive behavior.

Natpal is a relatively new kid on the block among those Greg details and I’d never heard of them until the incident described below.

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Some of what follows may be a little technical. If it’s confusing, please comment and ask for clarification. I know this stuff seems like voodoo but I try to keep my explanations accessible regardless of your level of knowledge but some of this is definitely search engine marketing specific.

Recently we (Search Influence) have had the huge blessing to have been referred a fair number of plastic surgery practices. Plastic Surgery (particularly “cosmetic”) is a great business – high margins, great compensation for the surgeon and a real incentive to maximize return on advertising investment.

Return on investment is what we focus on with all of our clients, so it’s been a nice fit.

Because of the potential for profit though, these guys are prey for all kinds of snake-oil salesmen. For years there have been directories, SEO firms and search marketing aggregators chasing this market. No doubt some of these do add value.
Recently we discovered Natpal.

It turned out that we had a mutual client who didn’t realize the potential risk in their techniques.

While reviewing our progress with one of our clients we were doing some searches to check on our client’s ranking we came across some Google pay per click ads. Since the only people who would have authorized PPC were sitting in the room we knew something was fishy.

We did a little more investigation and found a complete mirror of the client’s site on a different domain (.net when theirs is the .com).

So why is this bad? Search engines don’t like seeing the same content in two places. In fact, they want to treat one as “authoritative” and may even drop the non-authoritative site out of the rankings altogether.

There are some simple ways to avoid having content appear duplicated and a responsible provider does so.

Rather than go into a long explanation of why duplicate content is bad I’ll defer to Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz who makes it very understandable here.

“It’s particularly dangerous with new sites or those that have recently changed ownership. However, no matter whether you’ve got penalties or just find lots of your pages in supplemental hell, I highly recommend fixing the issue as I’ve described above.”

Aaron Wall of SEOBook discusses it here way back in October of last year.

And then, to make it even easier the Google engineers are nice enough to tell us all about it here.

And if you’d like a longer more technical description, you can read this post by Todd Malicoat, which includes a link to a PDF describing the concept of “shingles” relative to duplicated content (this is more technical than I typically recommend and not for the faint of heart).

In short, if you’re going to make a duplicate of a site you need to block the search engines from “indexing” (collecting data from) the duplicate – otherwise you run the risk of seriously hurting the real site.

The most common way to block the search engines is by use of a “robots.txt” tag in the root directory of your web site. The robots.txt file is primarily used to tell the search engines where they can and cannot go. Below is an example of what you’d find in a good robots.txt (copied from a ReachLocal client site):

# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Simply put, User-agent is the name the search engine calls itself when it requests information from your site (“*” = any). So in other words all search engines need to pay attention to what follows. “Disallow” should be obvious, and “/” is the root directory of the web server (and by default anything below).

So, with 3 simple lines of code you can keep a site safe from duplicate content.
The real problem is that once the damage is done, it can take months to regain ranking and some may never regain their original prominence.

So Natpal, a venture funded startup, reportedly a product of the Wharton school, has decided they’re going to focus on this rich market as well.

We have mutual clients with ReachLocal, JumpFly and other PPC aggregators and can clearly point to the value provided by these providers.

And, whether I like the return on investment or not, ReachLocal does do it right when it comes to issues of duplicating content.

As I said, it starts with one client. We say – gosh, what dopes! (Sometimes we use stronger language in private.)

And we tell our client that the next time they get an offer for online advertising they should forward the call to us. ‘Nuff said.

But then, we realize that we use the same call-tracking company and while in conversation with one of the techs there say “hey, if you’re working with Natpal you ought to tell them to watch out for this problem or they may really, really screw their customers”.

So, we don’t know them we don’t really compete with them and we were legitimately trying to help them in what we thought was an isolated incident.

I want to be clear: I don’t personally know anyone at Natpal, I don’t have any knowledge of their internal workings or their process. All I know is what I can see in the Google search results, and as a result of their ad-placements.

—

So today, while doing some searches on behalf of one of our clients I came across Natpal again. And, what I originally thought was a simple mistake is actually a consistent failing on their part likely to do a lot of harm.

If you work with Natpal, you should really look at some alternatives because these guys are, in my opinion, running a risk of hurting your real site’s ranking. If you feel like you can’t beat the ROI (and I’m sure you can if you find the right provider) and must stay with them then at least tell them to clean up their act.

In my investigation I started with this search:

This gave me a list of sites with Natpal’s self-promotion in the footer.

I then dug a little deeper and found a number of examples like the following.