Using SEO for Reputation Management

For those of you unfamiliar with the "white hat" and "black hat" terminology, "white hat" is considered ethical and "black hat" is considered unethical. When we analyze the topic of Reputation Management, even though "white hat" techniques don't officially break any rules, whether or not manipulating search engine results on behalf of a client is ethical or not is certainly open for discussion.

The requirement for Reputation Management arises when a company finds that links to negative press appear on the first page of search pages, sometimes even appearing higher on the list than links to the company itself. The challenge of the SEO company is to create new, carefully optimized pages containing "positive" content and build links to them so that the negative links are pushed onto page 2 or lower.

If the SEO Company achieve their goal, then when potential customers search for products or services related to their client, or search directly for the company name, then only links to positive pages should appear on page 1 of the SERP’s.

Of course, for every “white hat” technique there is always someone out there that decides to take things into their own hands, and one such case was where a company was having problems with pages from an industry forum appearing amongst the results on page 1 next to their company web site. Rather than pay for an SEO company to Embarq on a course of Reputation Management, they simply went out and bought the forum.

The first thing they did after taking ownership of the forum was to take the whole thing down and put up a page that advised members of a database crash. The offending posts were removed from the database and the forum was made live again with an explanation that even though the administrators had tried hard to recover all of the posts, some of them had been lost and they apologized for the inconvenience.

If Reputation Management in any of its different forms can be considered ethical, one wonders whether the above technique should fall into the white or black hat category. Although they achieved their goal and removed the negative press in this case, the company needs to learn real quickly that no person, company or even government can control the Internet and suppress its content.