SEO work - Reputation Managment experience

Before joining Digital Marketing Agency for internship, I always thought that the work of SEO was nothing more than optimizing the website on page, writing content, analysis, and link acquisition of offpage...etc., the first item at the end of this semesterscholarship links acquisitionAfter the task, the second task I received was called Reputation Management. I had never thought that SEO would be used in this place before. It was very interesting (but difficult...). Recently, this project has come to an end, and I have mixed feelings...

(This article may be quite long, please forgive me)

What is Reputation Management(RM)?

RM should be a word that comes from PR. It helps a company and people create a good image, how to deal with negative news, etc. In the online world, if a piece of news appears that will harm the company’s image and causes some repercussions, some people will share and write articles to respond to the news, and links will follow. This negative news may appear when someone searches for the company’s name. If it appears on the first page of SERP, people who are not aware of it will know that this kind of thing has happened to this company.

Therefore, Reputation Management, in SEO, refers to “burying” this kind of negative news on the second and third pages, so that people who originally didn’t know about it will still be less likely to know about it after searching.

My Reputation Management task

The target of the RM this time is the CEO of one of the company's clients. His name is: Peter Merrigan. In fact, he has not committed any crimes. He was only mentioned in a CNBC report on cryotherapy in August 2015. The report included a photo of his topless body in the treatment machine, which looked like a corpse in a freezer. Peter did not want anyone to Google his name and see this report that had nothing to do with his work, so he asked us for help.

You may be curious about what kind of picture and report it is. XD, you can click on the picture below to open it up, or you can check it on Google!

How to "bury" Negative Results

These web pages used to crowd out negative results can bereal website, I helped the CEO create his own www.petermerrigan.com. The keyword is in the URL, and the content inside will also contain information related to the CEO.

In addition, you can also create the CEO’sOtherSocial Profile, Twitter, G+, Flickr, Vimeo…etc., there are many platforms of this type, it would be better to find one that is related to the person involved~For example, this Phreak is an employee of Riot. On the first page of searching for his name, there are some files on Twitch, Leaguepedia, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. Twitch is for people who can broadcast live. It would not make sense for me to help this CEO create a Twitch account. Even if I did, it would be too irrelevant and there would be no followers or people willing to connect with you on it. Social Signal is not strong, and the ranking of this page will not be high (even if Twitch’s DA is 88!)

Difficulties

 

 

 

 

 

It would be fine if it was just a random small media report, but this report appeared on CNBC. When it was first received, it was ranked 6th, with a DA of 91, and was shared 229 times. Although the keyword peter merrigan did not appear in the title and URL, the keyword appeared in the text around the picture, Alt tag, and even the file name of the picture...

 

2. In addition to web pages, there are also pictures...

Images for XXX usually pop up when searching for a person’s name, and this Gallery is usually at SERP Position 2. It’s not easy not to see this picture. Even if the profiles I finally created successfully pushed the report to the second page, I still had to find a way to squeeze this picture out.

3. Insufficient Content

There is not much content that can be used, and there is nothing to put in the social profiles created for him. If the content is repeated, it will be easily filtered out by Google and only one will appear. Due to his status and the fact that his company is a long-term customer of ours, I can't help him write something randomly...

task process

Early stage

At the beginning of the task, my boss gave me an example that he had done before. There were a bunch of websites where you could create personal profiles, ranging from those with high DA toGoogle+It looks very birdy.Idolbin, and then these websites are interconnected with each other, pushing each other to the first page. To put it nicely, they are strategically building a pyramid and using a bunch of stooges to defeat CNBC, but to put it worse, it is actuallyLink Scheme.

I have created a total of 62 profiles of this big CEO, including relevant and irrelevant ones, because even if they are irrelevant websites, my (boss) purpose is to have a backlink pointing to the website we want to use for Outrank CNBC. I have another one The account I created on500pxwas suspended because it was a website that posted great photos for photographers, so I ended up posting a bunch of his photos XD

In addition to the Social Profile, I also helped this guy set up www.petermerrigan.com. This website is under our complete control, and it has keywords in the URL, so it naturally becomes the top of our evil Link Scheme pyramid. There shouldn’t be any here The problem withExact Match Domainis because peter merrigan is not a very competitive product keyword.

mid-term

In about 2 to 3 weeks, you can see the web pages I helped him build one after another on pages 2, 3, 4 and 5, but then the difficulty begins. Without valuable backlinks, it is difficult to improve the ranking of these web pages. In fact, in the whole process, I have only seen www.petermerrigan.com reach the 9th position on the first page, and it only lasted for half a day.

The main thing to do in the mid-term is to update these created web pages, post limited content (related to the CEO or his company) on some websites, and update some profiles to strengthen social signals.

In addition, the picture part also needs to “create” new pictures. If you have ever paid attention to the pictures in Google Images, you will find that there are rarely two identical pictures. *

Later

The article is a bit long, and you should want to know the result as soon as possible, but... there is no result. Our client contacted CNBC himself and asked them to take down the photo, and CNBC did as they asked. (current appearance) "The best way for Reputation Management is to contact the site owner directly and ask them to remove the content."In fact, it’s not that I don’t understand this. When I first listened to my boss’s explanation of the task, I asked why I didn’t contact the reporter directly (not as an afterthought!!). The boss didn’t agree at the time, so as a young intern, I could only scratch my nose and do a lot of white work.

Surprised and happy, mixed emotions

Learning experience

Reputation Management is something I don’t think should be expected to see results in the short term. I was too hasty and created a bunch of useless content. The best way is to use PR to find more media opportunities worthy of exposure and be included in other reports.

If you don’t have so much extra energy, time and money to engage in PR and strive for exposure, you must at least do the social profile part well, G+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, etc., run it well, focus on quality over quantity, connect with others, share useful information, increase the number of your followers, and strengthen social signals to have a chance to rank higher. Don’t follow my example of creating a bunch of accounts and then interconnecting them… I can say from my own experience,is not valid!!!I even wonder whether the management of this kind of social profiles should be done by the person involved himself, or at least by someone who understands his personal preferences and work industry. I have zero acquaintance with this Peter Merrigan, and I really don’t want him to chat with someone at a conference one day and the other person will say something like, “I saw that joke you posted on Twitter, hahaha.”

Harvest

Although I really, really hate this project, I have to say that I still learned a lot, some useful tools, concepts, knowledge… etc. Here are some places where I feel I have gained something. I will elaborate on the How-to of these things in the next article. photo retouching: I didn’t know how to do it before, but this time I learned some basic photo editing skills to help the CEO create different pictures. I used a free platform with simple functions. Customized URL forPixlr。 G+: Having keywords appear in the URL is of course a plus, so how do you make the Google Plus URL look what you want instead of a string of numbers. Sitemap: Because I helped him set up a website, I took the opportunity to secretly learn more about Sitemap. Although there are a lot of tools that can automatically generate sitemap.xml, it would be beneficial to understand what it looks like. Ask Google to index a web page: After building a social profile or adding an article, you can send the URL toThis wayPlease Google index this page quickly so that it can be found. Google Search Console: It’s also a blessing to visit this website. It gives me the opportunity to see what is there. At the same time, I also know that the data above is not too accurate… Ask Google to remove certain information: After discovering that CNBC took down the picture, you canThis wayAsk Google to look at this web page and tell them that this page has been updated and their record is Outdated. After Google crawls it again and finds that the image is indeed gone, it will take it down in the images search area. Images Search SEO: This is the thing that benefited me the most this time. Maybe it’s because I haven’t read enough articles, and I haven’t seen anyone mention this topic, but it may also be because this is not a pure white hat technique, and I can’t think of any other practical uses XD, but you can still look at it from an SEO perspective. It’s not about how the image file name should have keywords, Alt Tags, etc., but it’s about how to make a picture appear in Google Images Result.

Conclusion

The article writer has now started on the next task. I found out that the company I interned at did some black hat SEO, guest blogging, article spinning…etc. in 2009-2010. Although I am a bit speechless, this is probably the way SEOers did things a few years ago, and I am a bit emotional.

I hope that I will never encounter these methods and tricks with impure intentions in the future, and become a Marketer with SEO knowledge who abide by Google Guidelines and always put people as the starting point.