Dealing with Haters
It’s been a long time since I last wrote - all apologies to my faithful fan base - in a very literal sense you are “an army of one” :)Seriously, though, I have been doing some consulting for a client who has a serious problems with haters ranking on their brand so I thought it would be helpful to share some common techniques with you.Most of the time when I have dealt with haters (aka “suck sites”) the people I have been helping have had the instinct to want to start a bunch of new sites and outrank their competitors - this isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it does take a lot of time, work and patience. Probably the best strategy would be to pursue this approach along with a more immediate, easier approach: help your existing fans outrank the haters.So if I own purplewidget.com and somebody does a search for “purple widgets,” I should rank #1. If I don’t I need to fire my SEO or marketing guy - or both. But if somebody in the 2′nd or 3′rd position in saying “Purple Widgets is the worst place to shop online” on google there is going to be damage to my bottom line which is very hard to quantify.What I am proposing you do is go to the next review which is either positive (or neutral) in the rankings and give them some link love with your brand (ie, “purple widgets”) as the anchor text. Since they are already ranking well on this term it shouldn’t take too much time or work to outrank the haters (unless you happen to be working with an extremely popular brand - in this case you probably have the time and money to beat them anyway).This really isn’t rocket science but it is definitely something to take seriously. Do a search for uhaul to see an example of brand damage on a popular keyword term - what you will end up finding is the Uhaul Boycott Page in the middle of the SERP’s - the sad thing is that this has been around for a while and they still haven’t buried it. Seriously, UHaul, give me a call and we’ll talk…