Tag Archives: SEO

I was recently approached by a company asking the question: Can search engine optimization get rid of bad press in the search engine results? The answer is both yes, and no.

While you can’t wipe out the pages themselves from the search engine results (some scoundrels claim they can, but that’s another story), you can help your public relations online by getting rid of those results in a roundabout way. You don’t really need them to disappear, you just need them to sink a few pages back where no one will find it. So how do you do that? Good press. Lots of it that ranks well.

Generally where bad press will really affect you is not the keywords for which you are competing in your niche, but for your name itself. As you cannot have more than a few results on the same page for your site, you must then have high ranking content on other sites for your name.

There are two options available to you, and I suggest making use of both of them to increase the likelihood that the bad press will no longer appear in the first few pages.

1. Create content on another site that uses your company name in the title tag. Press releases are a good example of how businesses might go about this.
2. Create content on your site and submit it to sites that generally rank high in the search engines, such as Digg. Use your company name in the title tag.

It’s that easy… you can even link to these pages so that they achieve higher results as well.  You can also build links, but this must occur in a specific type of directory that gives each site it’s own page generally with the name of your site in the title tag.

And if you really want to spend money, why not get some reviews on blogs with the stipulation that they use your company name in the title of their post.

And that’s what I told them.

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There are so many ethical discussions that can arise when speaking of search engine optimization practices. It is interesting that something that at times can be rather technical can be discussed from an ethical standpoint, but thus it is nonetheless that the ethics of SEO has been spoken of from many different perspectives. I have identified a few of the different discussions that occur when speaking of the ethics of SEO.

Business ethics: The SEO consultant’s duty to the client

The first, and most widely discussed ethical discussion centers around the duty of an SEO consultant to their clients, and it focuses on responsibility of said SEO consultant to maintain ethical business practices. When so much about search engine optimization is veiled with mystery and I have even heard it referred to as “a game of Chinese Whispers”, it can be easy for SEO consultancy to become wrought with ethically loose individuals who make false claims or engage in practices that give only temporary results but hurt the site in the long run.

Generally, when one hires an SEO consultant, it would be hoped that they would follow search engine guidelines, but there are many approaches that be have temporary results that eventually may get your site banned from the search engines. There is also the fact that you may pay for search engine optimization, but when you stop paying your site will experience a great drop in the rankings. Take for example one of the evil uses of the unavailable_after tag.

The common responses to this are bound in the general epithets of ethical business, and the best summary I have found in response to this is the SEO Code of Ethics on BruceClay.com.

Is it ethical to engage in search engine optimization at all?

Search engines are built for the user – so is it right to “manipulate the results” to the advantage of the webmaster? This relates immediately back to the approach being used by an SEO – are they engaged in ethical SEO? Are they following search engine guidelines and building links in an organic fashion? So long as “white hat approaches” are being used, it seems to me that search engine optimization really seeks to enhance the user experience. By helping the user find the content that is appropriate for that which is being searched, the SEO is giving value back to the user.

But SEO only has value so long as the content has value. For search engine optimization to be valuable it must be engaged in optimizing content that has intrinsic worth to the person searching for it. Optimizing made for traffic ad pages is not ethical. Optimizing a page for a much searched term that has no relation to the content is not ethical.

Also, search engine optimization is free. Sure, paying an SEO consultant costs money. But on-site optimization and link building is free. So, it is available to all webmasters, and therefore is not a matter of a big company having unequal advantage or monopoly. Honestly, in my experiences, big companies are not making as much use of these as smaller companies. The internet, and search engine optimization in a sense makes it easy for smaller companies to shake up the monopoly which larger companies have on the market.

Search engine optimization and the TRUTH

Recently, I have seen the discussion arise regarding the New York Times employing search engine optimization techniques on old articles, some of which contain reputation-destroying and sometimes false information. This is not the first time that this discussion has arisen, this has often been an issue for companies with regards to bad press. Unfortunately, the user will find that which is relevant and if the content is part of public record, the user should be able to find it. And one always has the opportunity to wipe out bad press with good press. ;)

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A lot of major companies tend to ignore the benefits of search engine optimization. If people want to find them they will search for the name of the company and there they will appear so the web development team thinks: Our job is done. It makes it very easy when the domain name is the name of the company, which is always the case. But what about the rest of the traffic, the people who don’t think immediately of the company name when they are looking for what that company is specifically in a position to provide.

Let’s take Mr. Doug Framundi, owner of the Framundis grocery store chain (I am making this up), who purchased the domain name: framundis.com. The title tag for the site is Framundis, the site is entirely dynamic and there are no meta tags to speak of. When you search “framundis” his site ranks number one in the search engine rankings.

But what about the people who search for “grocery coupons” or “grocery lists” or “grocery stores”? That traffic seems pretty valuable too… after all why should they get their coupons on another site and make a grocery list elsewhere when they can do that on the Framundis site too? It is important not to rely simply on people knowing the company name, you want to spread that company name and grow as a company as well. But alas, the Framundis site is nowhere to be found. What a pity and a shame for Mr. Framundi.

Major retailers need to realize that as the internet becomes more important, and search engine use increases, it is time to face facts that not all traffic will come from searching the name of the company, and if that is the only keyword the site ranks for then they are missing out on a piece of the pie that could have been theirs.

This annoys me.

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People keep blogging about the unavailable_after tag that Jill Whalen mentions after hearing Dan Crow from Google speak at SEMNE. The unavailable_after tag is apparently exciting because it tells spiders when the page can no longer be crawled. This means that if you have promotional material online, or plan on moving pages to a paid section after a period of time, you simply use the unavailable_after tag. And despite some initial skepticism about the unavailable_after tag, Google has officially commented on this robots exclusion tag.

One the hand, it appears that the unavailable_after tag seems pretty useless. This is a valid viewpoint for bloggers. A loss of backlinks and traffic does not seem an incentive to go the extra effort of putting in the tag, and really, there would be no reason to.

But for newspapers and auction sites like eBay, I can see how these will be of benefit, not only for the sites but for the search engines. This means that sites that produce many pages daily can set a time limit for how long the pages should be crawled, which means that irrelevant pages will no longer appear in Google’s search results.

Most importantly, I think this may mean something to the average Google user – in theory, irrelevant outdated pages need no longer appear in the search results which increases the chance of finding relevant information.

But will they get used? Well, I suppose only time can tell, but I look forward to watching how this tag is used by webmasters. Do you see any positive or negative repercussions of the unavailable_after tag, if any at all?

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