Norwich University student Todd Renner addressed the issue of online reputation management in one of his essays for the Spring 2011 session of the IS342 Management of Information Assurance course. Everything that follows is a close collaboration between Mr. Renner and Mich Kabay.
* * *Search engine optimization (SEO) to raise the visibility of a specific company or person can involve questionable methods. For example, search engines can be manipulated to trick Web crawlers and increase the visibility of Websites to search engines. Methods of spamdexing include
• Google bombing/Googlewashing (link bombing) – a twisted SEO effort to link a particular search phrase to certain Websites"), often by creating large numbers of links (a notable example lists the Church of Scientology's home site as the top result for the search of "dangerous cult"). There have even been SEO Google bombing contests to get the highest rank by linking random phrases such as "Hommingberger Gepardenforelle."
• Google bowling – If you want to be the tallest tree in the forest, cut down the ones bigger than you. This term describes the effort of getting a competitor's Website removed from Google's indexes (Google ban) by using such methods as pointing an obvious link farm to the site, or leaving links to known viruses in comment sections (which will work if the site is poorly managed).
• Keyword stuffing – "Duplicating descriptive words in the body and/or in the meta tags of a Web page in order to rank the page high on search engine results. Also called 'word stuffing.'"
• Link farms – sites "containing a very large list of hyperlinks to different Websites without groupings, categories, or any relationship to the site domain name. Many link farm sites have no actual content of their own or standards for link submission. Link farms are disreputable versions of legitimate sites exchanging links based on related topics to provide visitors with some added content value.”
• Invisible text – text with the same color as the background of the Web page as part of a link farm. The example described in the link above is a recursive link farm using invisible text: the pages in the array of pages link to each other to increase the score of the targeted Web sites in search-engine rankings.
• Doorway pages – "Webmasters are sometimes told to submit 'bridge' pages or 'doorway' pages to search engines to improve their traffic. Doorway pages are created to do well for particular phrases. They are also known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages, and by other names as well."
The shadiest practices don't come from manipulation of machines and algorithms, but from deception and manipulation carried out directly by humans. Tactics such as astroturfing, sock puppetry, and flogging are all examples of unethical forms of ORM used by some SEO companies.
• Astroturfing (named after the synthetic grass, "AstroTurf") is the act of creating fake grassroots organizations to endorse a client or a client's point of view or criticize a political position or a competitor under the guise of pseudo-authenticity. Typically, these organizations are staffed with people directly involved with the company or industry they're promoting. In a notorious case of astroturfing, a public relations firm was hired by a coal company to lobby against a bill in the U.S. Congress that would have regulated coal-industry activities. They forged letters – including forged logos – claiming to be from various social-activism groups and were eventually discovered.
• Sock puppetry is the practice of pretending to be someone else and using the same techniques as astroturfing, the difference being the scale (sock puppetry is mainly done with individual reviews). For a hilarious send-up of sock puppetry, see the article in "Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia." Just don't take any of the content seriously.
• Flogging is, in current marketing parlance, a portmanteau term made up from the two words 'fake' and 'blogging', and refers to the practice of companies employing fake bloggers to write glowing reviews of certain products.”
Another approach is simply to flood the Internet with so many positive comments that searchers can form a positive opinion based on prevalence and position in the search pages. For example, the firm Wag the Dog Marketing wrote, "We at Wag the Dog Marketing call it just that: Internet Reputation Repair. What we do is craft hundreds or even thousands of good, similar but different articles, and submit each one to a large number of article directories. This pushes the rip-off reports and other garbage libel sites down from the top of the search results." That company provides a perfect example of flogging itself: type "wag the dog marketing" (without the quotation marks) into Google's search field and examine the enormous number of extraordinarily similar and glowingly positive reviews about them.
ORM companies are influential in the realm of Internet searches, and attract many high-paying, high-profile customers. Although there are legitimate ORM and SEO tactics, the reality is that they take time and hard work to produce quality results. However, when ethics are not an issue and the client is rich and desperate enough, unethical and illegal shortcuts that flood the online world with misleading information become increasingly attractive.
In the final part of this series, Todd Renner studies how British Petroleum tried to manage its online reputation in the Deepwater Horizon fiasco.
No comments:
Post a Comment