Reputation Management :: A prerequisite of Effective Link
Building
Over the past few articles I've brought you different tactics
you can use to help build quality links to your site.
And while I am going to continue to bring you even more of these
tactics I thought it would be good to step back and take a big
picture look at why link building is important.
Further, I wanted to look at other things you should be
considering when you are doing your link building: Namely
managing your online reputation.
As the web evolves, reputation management becomes even more
critical to your online business. This is because many people
will form their opinion of your or your business based on the
sites found around you.
An upset former customer can do a whole lot more damage to your
reputation online that you may suspect. If they are a popular
blogger, for example, and are able to call on their network of
sites to help promote their negative view of you, it can have a
detrimental impact on your search rankings.
This is because they can use a tactic called link bombing to
rank higher than you for your name or the name of your company.
What do you mean links can be bad? Just like how you need to
build links to improve your link popularity and ultimately
search engine rankings, links from other sites can work against
you. Let me give you a practical example:
If you do a search on Google for "miserable failure" or
"failure" you will see that President George Bush's White House
bio is ranked number one. This is an example of many thousands
of sites linking to the site's bio page, with the anchor text
"miserable failure" and "failure" in them. Google then counts
these links as votes for the site for that phrase. Since the
site receives the most votes it ranks the highest.
But this is just one example of using links to negatively
influence search rankings. There is another where personal sites
and blogs have used similar linking strategies to outrank
corporate websites for negative terms.
I once talked to an attorney who was ranked #2 for his own name
behind a blog site which went on about how terrible an attorney
he was and how you shouldn't hire him.
The blog site took advantage of the system by requesting links
on the attorneys name from other bloggers, thus moving it ahead
of the attorney's own site.
It is this type of tactic which can be used against you because
in this case, short of legal action, the attorney would have to
build even more links to his site for his name than the negative
blog.
In the mean time, however, the blogger continues receiving links
as other sites which link to him now request the same links. It
becomes a snowball effect. One link leads to three, which leads
to ten, then a hundred, then 500 then 1,000 and so on.
That is the real power of blogging - the ability to quickly
build links back to your site on virtually any phrase you chose
to target.
And since bloggers have that much pull, they can (and in many
cases do) use that ability against you.
But it doesn't have to be just bloggers that do that. Any site
that has the pull can post a derogatory page about you and flood
the web with backlinks, through submissions to thousands of
directories and other sites which don't check for quality and
will accept automated submissions.
And the kicker of this is, by the time you realize it has
happened to you, it's almost too late.
That's because those links were submitted months ago and have
passed Google's aging policy. The only way you can combat this
is to build a similar number of positive links and wait the same
time until Google approves the links and adds them to your link
inventory.
As you can imagine that can take some time so in the meantime
your site suffers because of these negative tactics which were
begun months ago.
So how you do combat negative links?
There is no real way to combat them. Once they are there they
pretty much exist forever. The only real strategy is to ensure
that you continue to build high quality relevant links to your
site. Thus, you are essentially taking preventative action
against those who may not have your best interests at heart.
That means using the tactics I've described in some of the
recent articles, and continuing to monitor your link popularity.
It also doesn't hurt to subscribe to services like Google
Alerts. I use this to monitor a variety of keywords both in the
news and in the organic rankings.
You could create an alert for your name and receive emails
whenever there is a mention of your name - either through the
news, or when a site begins to move in the organic rankings.
Then you can monitor a few sites to ensure that nothing
magically appears ahead of you that is negative in nature.
And if you do find a negative site that appears on Google's
radar, at least you can take a somewhat proactive stance and
begin building positive links at an increased rate, to keep them
down in the rankings, and solidifying your position.
Summary
I don't want to scare you with this. It's not something that is
rampant on the web. In fact, the average person has no idea how
to "trash" you online, other than perhaps posting a negative
comment on your website (if you allow commenting).
All I wanted to do with this article was to let you know that
such individuals do exist. And they do have the power to
supplant your positive online image with a negative review of
you even if it is untrue.
But if you follow the rules of good link building you can help
prevent such attacks from happening to you.