Black Hat Reputation Management - 6 Steps to Control Bad Press

Bad press about your business can be very upsetting, especially when it is written by a disgruntled customer who posts information about you or your company online for the world to see. Oftentimes, this information is very visible in the search engines and is by its very nature extremely biased and one-sided. Here are six steps you can take which have proven effective in dealing with online slander. And some of them are black hat. But fear not - it works.

Online slander is a modern pain in the rear, and even more so when disreputable sites like Ripoff Report get involved. In such cases, the gloves come off, and here are some ways you can take care of business - if you don't mind getting your hat dirty.

1. Write articles.

Nothing black hat about this tip. Reputation management is about creating content. The more content you create, the more of a chance you have for that content to appear in the search engines. The trick is to make the content more relevant than that of the bad guys. One way to do this is to begin a series of articles on what you know best - your business. Two types of articles that are particularly attractive to people (and hence are more likely to serve as link bait, thereby increasing the relevancy of the article in the engines) are how to articles and product reviews. These types of articles are relatively easy for the average business owner to write - because, after all, you know your industry best.

Write a series of articles about your industry, products you sell, or tips and tricks of the trade. You don't have to give away all of your secrets - just give away enough information to show that you are an authority on the subject. Make sure your company name appears in the articles. This can typically be done via an attribution paragraph at the end of each article ("this article brought to you by...").

Be sure to include your company name in the html title tag of the page the article resides on - this will help the search engines understand that this particular piece of content may be relevant to queries for your company name. This, in turn, helps your content appear at the top, as opposed to the mean stuff.

2. Create blogs.

Now this is a little black hat (okay, a lot black hat), but it works, and there is really no downside. In other words, if you get "caught", so what? It won't harm you - only the blogs you create risk being thrown into the supplemental search results or de-indexed. Your site itself is not in jeopardy.

Create a number of free blogs. Blogspot blogs work just fine. You can create as many of these as you like, for free. Just use a number of fake email addresses (Yahoo does just fine) to set them up. Make sure they are hosted on Blogspot's server and not your own. Go ahead and create 5, 10, 20 or however many you want. The more you create, the more likely your chances of supplanting the bad guys in the search results with some of your blogs.

Set them up so that the title of the blog is your company name (or whatever search query it is that you are seeking to control). Now start filling the blogs with content - a fancy word for more articles, but they can be short, just a paragraph or two is fine. Make sure to build links in your blog entries to your other blogs using anchor text of your company name or other target search query.

Link all the blogs back and forth to each other. Who cares? This would not be recommended as an SEO practice - but it seems to work in reputation management if you need a quick fix. I don't promise it will last forever, but it can buy you a quick thirty or sixty days while your other strategies ramp up.

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3. Create dummy domains.

Another black hat method that works very well is the purchase of dummy domains. Go purchase some domain names, maybe ten or so, from various domain registrars. Host each of the domains with a different hosting company (but be sure not to host any of them on the same server or with the same hosting company you use for your business site).

Build out each domain maybe three to five pages - Home, About Us, whatever. Just come up with five or so pages of stuff for each domain. Optimize the title tags, meta description element, and H tags on each page to include your company name. Start linking from these domains to the various blogs created above, and link back from the blogs above to the various domains. Mix it all up and make it confusing - some link to some, others link to others, but they don't all link to each other. When creating links, be sure to use anchor text containing your company name or target search queries.

Again, this is not a recommended SEO practice, but it works as a quick fix in many reputation management cases while the "real" strategy has time to take effect.

4. Create social media profiles.

There is nothing black hat about creating social media profiles, except when you start creating fake ones (muahahaha). And why not create fake ones? Most people fake who they are anyway on social media sites. Social media profiles containing your company name or the name of any target principles can appear in search results very quickly. Examples include LinkedIn, FastPitch, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etcetera. Create a whole bunch of them. It works.

You should also create legitimate social media profiles which you intend to maintain in the long run. Create one legitimate profile per social media outlet, and give your customers a way to connect with you.

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5. Issue press releases.

Press releases are white hat and you should begin issuing press releases immediately upon commencement of your reputation management campaign. Positive publicity about your company that you control and spin in whichever direction you want is a great way to combat online slander. The issuance of press releases provides a wonderful opportunity for mentions of your company to appear all over the web - thus populating search results for your company's name.

6. Optimize your site.

It would be wise to make sure that at least some of the pages on your own website follow standard on page optimization techniques for your company name. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for the home page of your site, but such pages as "about us", "our people", "company history", and that sort of thing can be optimized for your company name without fear of losing any rankings position for your searches for your products or services. Making sure your company name appears on these pages in basic elements such as the title tag, meta description, and h tags is a good way to get your own site to appear in search results for your company name.

ArteWorks SEO is ranked #1 in the world by TopSEOs.com for reputation management. Please contact us at 877-812-2217 for more information or to begin your reputation management project.