Copy Brighter

Sometimes the need to remove negative publicity is very real and overpowering:

In case you are victim of an unwarranted attack, or you need to overpower a pesky duplicate brand – here are some proven online reputation management tactics.

You'll Probably Need Links

Some articles suggest that online reputation management is easy. They say all you have to do is make a bunch of MySpace profiles and Squidoo lenses. If Bill Lumberg of Initech were an online reputation manager, he'd say, "Ummm..... yyyyeeeeeah...... Right."

Just making profiles might work for little-known brands or obscure personal names. But what if you're working on a nationally known company or famous person, and it's exceedingly difficult to rank for their name? What if the dirt is being dished out by multiple international news sites packing PR 9 domains? In these cases, you need to choose your profiles sites carefully, optimize the pages well, and point lots of good links at them. And you're gonna have to do this all discreetly, without attracting attention of the UGC site admins or making a dirty backlink profile in the search engines.

Filling Up the Front Row

The Google SERPs are like the 10 seats in the front row of a hot concert. If you can get some strong friends to help you fill up the front row and keep the bum rushers and hecklers away - you'll enjoy a perfect view with no hassles or interruptions.

One of the best places to create solid "friends" is on user-generated content (UGC) sites that have high PageRank domains and lots of visibility. You can find examples of successful, high-ranking UGC site profiles by searching for pharmaceutical buy words like "buy Cialis" or juicy phrases in the credit / mortgage / debt sphere.

Some Good Bets

I've seen some magical things happen with ClaimID, a site specifically designed to help with identity management and profile consolidation. Technorati and Reddit are pretty hot, too. Squidoo used to work well a few months ago, but Google seems to have cracked down on it.

In this very generous Q and A post, guru-ji Aaron Wall recommends taking a good look at Work.com articles, YouTube, Twitter and Stumble, IGN and Weather.com, eHow and WikiHow & Associated Content, Yahoo! Answers, Del.icio.us, Digg, DomainTools, QuantCast and SpyFu.

Making the Profile Pages

Sign up for a profile. If you wanted to rank for "Blockbuster Video" then make a username called "blockbuster-video" and hopefully this will get your keywords in the URL and in the title tag. Companies or brands with three-word name are tricky to fit into profiles on some sites, but work very well on others. Put a little effort into make the profile look alive - add some friends, add some content and add some value. All the usual rules of on-page SEO apply... so do your best to put enough enough keywords in the text, headers, title tags, alt tags, etc. Set up a few different free profiles and see which ones work best. If some don't work out, that's okay. Like Rambo, they are "expendable."

Pumping Up Your Profiles' Power With Links

The tricky part about tough reputation management jobs is getting enough good backlinks. Quality directories won't touch profiles. Good webmasters won't link to profiles either, they want to link to your main site. Some of the online drugstore cowboys get 'er done by comment spamming old guestbooks and neglected dofollow .edu blogs, but that's low-blow SEO - and I only do and recommend consenting link exchanges.

So where can get enough links to your profiles, apart from those seedy link farms with 3-way petting zoos and Ugandan church guestbooks?

If you control lots of high ranking sites you can point links from your own properties, but this might not look so natural if you throw them all up overnight and your pages aren't topically related to the content on your profiles. Go slowly. If you were trying to rank profiles for Blockbuster Video, I would recommend getting the needed links from video-related sites: video rental and production companies, video camera sellers, online video hosting, etc.

The Anatomy of a Potent Presell Page

Create a sitewide link on remote page, linking to one "ad page" on the remote site...  an important page that basks in all the internal link juice. The more links the presell page has and the higher up in the architecture of the site, the better.

Write 3 or 4 paragraphs of top-quality copy describing your subject in a way that the site would if it weren't an ad. In this copy, link 4 or 5 times to your various profile pages with appropriate anchor text. For more information on presell pages check these out.

Signs of a Good, Clean Presell Page Candidate

The most powerful pages you can get links from are the ones that rank #1 for the terms you'd like to tank for. If you wanted to make a profile for "Blockbuster Video" rank, it's be great to get links from Blockbuster.com and IHateBlockbuster.com, as these are the real authority sites. But oftentimes these authority sites won't give you ads or want way too much in exchange for them. If you need to, look several pages back in the SERPs and you're sure to find some less picky, less picked-over prospects with decent page rank that are close enough to your target topic or brand.