Search Engine Strategies: Public Relations Via Search Engines: Converseon
The last speaker was Rob Key, President and CEO of Converseon. He spoke about how companies have these negative sites that portray them in terrible lights, and how the companies don’t pay enough attention to these sites until they’ve lost sometimes millions in sales.
4.1 million people search for Home Depota month, and they see homedepotsucks.com in the fourth position, on the first page. Most people assume that if a page ranks high in a search engine, its trustworthy. There are an estimated 12,000 “flame pages” out there currently.
One bit of advice: Don’t run to litigation. Many sites desire litigation, because its great for publicity. You can also do direct outreach, but you get the impression of sending shills to spam the site.
When companies do outreach, they can get their own statements out there, and even push these other sites down in the listings. One idea that might work is to create multiple domain sites, all with different but relevant content, and you may be able to get all ten results with five sites. Also, a company can look to see if the flame sites are using “black hat” SEO tactics, in which case you can get them knowcked right off Google by complaining.
