Good Post over at SearchGuild about what to do if someone else is tarnishing your name

Let's say someone writes a bad review of your company and it starts ranking for your company name, and this name is search for enough that this matters. Outside of crashing their servers or lawsuits, how would you clean them out the rankings?

Gurtie (who sent me the AdWords voucher tip) had a good answer

if you post good reviews on places like ciao and e-pinions they tend to rank high (especially Ciao) so that might be an easy way to push the bad one down. Also if people have read some good ones first they might ignore the bad one.

If the existing bad review is on a public review site then obviously get people to disagree with it.

Or if you have something you can issue a press release for if you can get the name in the trade news and forums that should be indexed quickly and might help short term?

Or you could change the company name, grow a mustache and move to mexico.

Have you ever had to bury bad news? How did you do it?

Sometimes what you are intended to do is extremely obvious when the writer is extremely motivated...this is one of those examples.

Cybersquatter

- Person(s) who grab a domain name which could be of certain potential value based on other aspects of the internet. In the past some cybersquatters would take a domain the day it expired on some people. Many cybersquatter sites also place porn where an original high traffic domain existed. The other common cybersquatter technique is to use misspellings to ruin the brand image or monitize a small amount of traffic.

If the domain SEO book was available about 5 months ago then why in the hell would I make an offer to this cybersquatter who spammed me wanting to sell SEObookS.com?

I take it as a compliment that he recognizes I am building a website that is starting to get a fair amount of traffic. I will not pay him 1 cent for his domain though.

Perhaps I am not concerned with my brand image, or my brand image may be a lack of concern... INBOUND SPAM:Dear Mr. Wall,

Hereby I would like to invite you to make an offer on the domain name
SEObooks.com.

As you know, SEO is the abbreviation for search engine optimization, which is
currently a booming market. Since almost every webmaster wants more traffic,
they will want to buy books that cover the subject of SEO.

Please send your offer by April 1st, 2004. Should you have any questions, please
don't hesitate to contact us.

I look forward to your prompt response.

Best regards,
Quincy Beeker
Founder of DNKing.com

Korvezeestraat 12
2628DA Delft
The Netherlands
Email: sales@dnking.com

REPLY: Hello Quincy
how much would you be willing to pay for dnkings.com?
thanks
aaron

I enjoyed talking with Kevin Lee (of Did It) at lunch the first day. He is a real marketers marketer. It was great to listen to his love of paid inclusion and how it can squash untargeted affiliate marketing. He also seemed to like one of my blog ideas. His company also gave out rather large cookies...yum.

I went up and thanked Danny Sullivan (of SearchEngineWatch) for linking into my site toward the end of last year. He is a rather funny and one of the most approachable guys at the conference. I also got the free SEW t shirt :)

I sat next to Mike Grehan (who wrote one of the larger books on search engine technology) for a few sessions. He was rather mellow and interesting to talk to. I think there are few sources in the world with more info and less bs.

I met a reporter and one of the Overture reps at the Yahoo! party. I also ran into Andy Beal (of Search Engine Lowdown) there.

I also ate lunch is Greg Jarboe (of SEO-PR) and talked shop some with him. I am always interested in learning business models and techniques off of extremely successful business people. He (as a former editor) also came up with a good name for a doubious award I aim to create.

Greg also told me of the good old days when he paid for his Yahoo! Directory inclusion by sending them a pizza.

I ran into Anrew Goodman who said "in the flesh and blood" when I said who I was. Cool to see how many people know me by name.

I also met Debra Mastaler, Jill Whalen, Bryan Eisenberg, Eric Ward, Christine Churchill and a bunch of others...

Who is this Linking Tips Post for?
The recent rash of SEO firms that have been asking for links off of me.

Why this Post about Link Requests?
While a few guys have been courtious, I have seen some real igornant stuff today. These link building strategies are not really strategies, just dumb.

What are some of the Exampes of Terrible Link Requests?

"Hi Aaron,

I was wondering if you would be so kind to add a link to xxxxx.
On your links page you mentioned that you are open to suggestions.

Xxxxx is one of the SEO leaders in the UK and Europe and has handled big
names and brands and it would probably deserve a spot on your links page for that. It's one of the few Scottish companies that have achieved such a
tremendous status.

Hope you will consider my request and please forgive me if it offends you in any
way."

This guy requested a link by saying his site deserves one. What is that?

Another large SEO company today spammed me with a link exchange request for their pharmacy from my drug information website.

Another firm used the "Where is our link?" question. A blunt answer to people using that technique is that "it will never be on my site." Of course I will not reply to their spam as it will only get me on more spam link request lists.

How do You Request a Link?
Find the webmasters details. In a personal manner contact them and explain where your link should be includded and how it adds value to their user experience. At the very least offer a link exchange back if you can not do a good job of explaining how your site adds value. When you offer a link exchange make sure you put your link up BEFORE you contact the person.

There is a bunch more to it, but that little paragraph would help the above SEO firms a great deal in their conquests.