Great reviews at places like Google Local and Yelp can help your search engine rankings and encourage shoppers to buy your products or services. Is it any wonder, then, that some businesses have succumbed to the temptation of soliciting fake rave reviews? Of course not. And a mini-industry has appeared to satisfy that temptation.

5-Star Reviews

The more fake 5-star reviews that are handed out, the more you need to rise above the competition. It’s like an arms race in counterfeit superlatives.

The New York Times recently wrote about an attempt to deal with this.

Determining the number of fake reviews on the Web is difficult. But it is enough of a problem to attract a team of Cornell researchers, who recently published a paper about creating a computer algorithm for detecting fake reviewers. They were instantly approached by a dozen companies, including Amazon, Hilton, TripAdvisor and several specialist travel sites, all of which have a strong interest in limiting the spread of bogus reviews.

Google?

I’m sure Google is working on this as well. In my opinion, trafficking in mendacious online reviews will come to bite you in the butt. Google is very unlikely to stop at disregarding the fake reviews it finds — more likely it will penalize the site employing such tactics. Back in 2006 we wrote about Ricoh and BMW cheating for higher rankings and getting completely banned from Google for more than six months.

We don’t know if Google has fake review detection in place, or how effective it is, but you can rest assured that they will develop a very effective system for it in the future. And when they do, a lot of websites will suffer for employing those dishonest tactics.

Your website can’t afford a serious Google slap-down.

Some may be tempted to create fake reviews to dampen the effect of a negative review that appears about their company online. Don’t. There are better ways to deal with negative reviews, though, some of which we discussed in this blog last year. If you feel you really need some good reviews to counter the bad press, ask your most delighted customers to give you a review — but make sure they do it in their own words.

Let’s say someone writes a scathing indictment of you or your company. Very possibly, anyone searching for your name will find those negative comments. Bad news!

Online reputation management companies work to minimize the impact of those negative reviews (seldom can you get them completely removed) by creating optimized positive content that will show up higher than the negative content. Push it down far enough and few if any people will ever see it.

Of course those concerned with ethical SEO discourage anything you do just for the search engines and that’s not useful to searchers. So will this tactic cause you trouble with the search engines? At Google, apparently not. Recently on NPR’s All Tech Considered, it was remarked that:

Google doesn’t seem to have a problem with the whole game [search suppression]. As the world’s largest search engine, a spokesman there says creating new content to hide negative material is fair play.

Google’s own post on this reinforces that position:

For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.

Note that they specify useful information. Don’t just publish optimized garbage and expect it to do well. But if you generate useful content, it shouldn’t get you in trouble with Big G.

Negative reviews are hurtful to your pride and your business. Enough so that a whole new industry has sprung up: “:reputation management”. But if someone posts a negative review on your Facebook fan page (you do have one of those, right?) you will be tempted to immediately delete it. Don’t.

Lisa Barone, of Outspoken Media,  has written about five excellent reasons to leave those negative expressions in place, and how to leverage that to your advantage. Here they are, but you need to read Lisa’s article for a full understanding.

1. You want the conversation to happen at home
2. It’s a chance to change the conversation
3. You get to show off your customer service
4. Gives you street cred
5. You get feedback you can act on

You certainly don’t want to encourage negative reviews, but if you respond properly you can turn them into a positive experience for everyone.

Buying up lots of domain names that are vaguely similar to your primary domain is common practice and lots of online business owners will have a stash of domains that they have invested in rather than simply buying just one.

In most cases where clients simply want to have multiple domains with keyword variations in the domain name, we usually suggest that’s not an effective strategy. But there are some valid reasons for registering multiple domain names.

Search Marketing Standard lists four specific reasons it might make sense to do so:

1. Owning multiple domains can lead to more traffic
2. Owning certain domain variations can be a strategic decision
3. They can help you leverage domain complaints or domain reviews
4. Multiple domains can handle misspellings of your domain

See the article in Search Marketing Standard for an elaboration of each of those.

No matter how good your company is, someone may still write something negative about you, even if you tried your best to help them.

A customer might write negative comments about your company in their blog or one of your competitors might try to damage your reputation by creating false comments about you. One of our clients turned down a job applicant who then retaliated by writing negative, false reviews about them in several places on the web.

What can you do if web pages with negative comments appear on the first page of a major search engine?

1. Fix the problem (if there is a problem)
If people write negative reviews about your company, the first thing that you should do (if the allegations are true) is to fix the problem that caused the negative review in the first place.

2. It never hurts to ask
Send the webmaster of the web page with the negative review a polite email and ask for removal of the negative comments. Many webmasters will cooperate if you explain the issue, especially if the negative review is false or libelous.

3. Give web pages with positive reviews a bump
If the webmaster does not want to remove the negative review, find websites that contain positive comments about your site. Link to these pages from your own website to increase the link popularity of these pages. The more links the pages with the positive reviews have, the higher they will be ranking in the search results.

If appropriate, bookmark web pages with positive remarks about your website on social bookmark sites such as Digg, Delicious and Faves.

4. Request testimonials from delighted customers
If you receive positive feedback from customers, ask them to write a review on ConsumerReview.com, Epinions.com, Yelp, Angie’s List, Judy’s Book or similar sites.

5. Add your website to company wiki pages
Websites like AboutUs.org allow you to create an article about your company. If your company is large enough, you might even create an entry in Wikipedia. These Wiki pages will also appear in the search results when someone searches for your company name.

6. Make sure that your own website tops the search results
If your own website comes first for your company name then many people will click on your link and not look further. Rank Magic can help you achieve that.

A new mini-industry has sprung up to protect or repair the reputations of companies and individuals online. A client of ours was recently featured on national TV and was the subject of a high level of searches on her name. Prominently displayed in these search results were some unfair and untrue rantings of a disgruntled individual. How to minimize the impact?

In this case, simply showing that the rant was untrue resulted in it’s being removed. But far too often people and companies find such negative material on the web totally intractable. Enter the reputation management companies, who employ numerous techniques, many of the quasi-SEO techniques, to minimize the visibility of the bad press. Jordan Glogau explains in a recent article explains the kinds of reputation problems that are frequently encountered, and outlines what’s necessary to correct them. He works for Internet Reputation Management.

There’s a resource site for the subject you may find of value at Reputation-Info.com, and Internet Reputation Management has a good article entitled Ten Easy Steps to a Positive Internet Reputation.

I hope you never need it.

Now that everyone uses the Web, people are learning to use it to their advantage to disparage those they’re got a grudge against. On the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, they talk about a web site put up by Charlie Harper’s jilted girlfriends, at www.CharlieHarperSucks.com.