Since my experiment in reputation management is actually getting much more interesting than I planned I thought I should go back and do a proper writeup.
The goal of my reputation management experiment was to try and come as close to the ‘perfect serp’ for a particular company’s listing. My plan was to use external websites that allow free content, press releases, and possibly some internal subdomains if necessary (see Tips for Controlling the Top 10 for more details).
The Background: The domain was registered in 2003, went live with content somewhere in the second half of 2003. It’s a PR4 with some backlinks, nothing too spammy, but nothing too powerful or authoritative either. While there were some minor updates over the years no major content changes or additions happened during that time. Some pages are supplemental and the site is definitely “lightly crawled”
On Site Cleanup: The design was OK although the template was table based (ugh) and needed some TLC. The directory structure was a little disorganized, there were about 30 pages that were “.html”. I moved the site into wordpress and set it up to work in static CMS configuration (A tutorial on this is in the works). I did this to make the site easier to maintain and add content to for it’s owner, plus it would now have “news” or “blog” functionality. The fix-up was completed on or about May 1st with 301 redirects set up for the old HTML pages. This site isn’t high risk so was perfect candidate for Google sitemaps which was implemented through the Google Sitemaps Plugin for Wordpress.
The SERPS
Day 0:
Google: Position 1 (no indents)
Yahoo: Position 1 (no Indents)
MSN: Position 1 (no indents)
OffSite Reputation Management:
At this point I created information on the following offsite services (wordpress, blogger, squidoo, newsvine, goglebase, MSN spaces and Myspace). Links from the main site went to each of the supplementary websites, and I interlinked 2 of the sites to all the other sites. I visited each of them in internet explorer with the toolbar enabled (don’t know that that still does anything, but since it also let’s me check to makes sure site isn’t broken no harm done). Searched directly for the URL’s in each of the three engines, and clicked on the results. I also submitted each of the URL’s to MSN with the URL submission tool.
- SEO Case Study: Outbound Links SEO Case Study: Outbound Links Experiment: To determine if outbound...
- Optimal Titles: SEO Case Study SEO Case Study: Optimal Title Structure Experiment: To determine what...
- Using Sponsored Blog Themes For Reputation Management This is the second time I’ve encountered this technique in...
See my disclaimer about advertising and affiliate links
{ 4 comments }
Interesting casestudy Michael. Thanks! I have a question – just would like to clarify something:
1. What kind of “information” did you create on “offsite services”? Is it one paragraph service/business description, a whole page of information? Is it unique or all of them have the same info?
2. As I understood you didn’t link from the “offsite services” to your main site, but opposit – you linked to the “offsite services” from your main site?
3. When you say “interlinked 2 of the sites to all the other sites” do you mean you linked to all of the sites from 2 “offsite services” or something else?
Hope it’s not too many questions
I just want to make sure I get it all right.
Thanks and I’m looking forward to reading Part II
On each of the other services there is anywhere from 1-3 paragraphs of original text, that is tailored for that particular service. For example the language on “myspace” is different than that on wordpress. Most of them will be ongoing with new text entries to make them look “lived in”. With a frequency of once a week-ish to once a month-ish. You don’t it to look like it’s a splog program running.
The main site links to all of the satellited sites, each of the satellite sites link back to the main site. two of the satellite sites link to all of the other satellite sites. My goal isn’t to use the satellite sites to pump up the main site, just to create relevant listings on different services for the company name.
I see now.
Don’t you think this kind of things are easy to spot at least for Google and devalue? I did a small experiment with googlepages a little while back when it just came out. I created a page and wrote about the service on my blog and linked to it just to show the features I tried there. In a very short time (about 2 months) my googlepages page had PR4 and ranked #2 for my name. When I noticed that, I created another page for one of my commercial sites, wrote a post about it and linked to the new page from the post. In less then a month the googlepage with PR4 turned into PR0 and droped to #5 in google. Note that I didn’t link to the new page from the main page that was PR4. The other page I created ranks #6 for may name but does not show up in the first 100 results for it’s title (well the 3 word keyphrase is pretty competitive but still..). It might be irrelevant, but who knows.
I’d say it sticks out like a sore thumb, so it’s not a viable tactic for anything even mildly competitive. For most companies their name is a relatively uncompetitive term, so you won’t need a lot of “juice” for it to work. Additionally if someone decides to start saying bad things about them, it’s good to already have a few spots up and running to combat it than starting from scratch.
Comments on this entry are closed.