Getting My Name to the Top of Google (Search Engine Reputation Management)

September 4, 2008 No comments

This is a guest post by my good friend CPA Share. I just saw that he’s recently cranked it up with his blog and been posting a lot, so definitely check it out. Most of you probably know that Harrison is 16 years old and making a lot more money than most of you probably are. Every time I talk to him he’s at some different spot around the world. Anyways, here’s his post…

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I asked Paul to write a guest post– and given that I’m in the writing mood on topics such as affiliate marketing networks and local online advertising, I thought we could talk about SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management). This is just a fancy way of ranking for your own name (or that of others) by buying that domain name. And if you don’t own your own name, you should snap up at least the dot com version, whether or not you plan to develop it, since it’s a pre-emptive measure for folks who might do it later. For example, you might be:

a rep at United Airlines Mileage Plus who accidentally marked a customer as fraud, but then tried to bamboozle your way out, digging yourself deeper. Don’t allow an unhappy customer to buy your name. You might even buy your name just because there are so many others with your same name.
a boulder massage therapist who happens to give me free massages in exchange for some promotion of her massage therapy business.
someone convicted on a major crime: not going to tell you who, but we’ll just say this guy had some pretty bad pages dominating all of the first 30 listings– with cnn.com talking about the biggest bust ever done by the Feds, and his name all over it.

If your name is not common, then ranking first for your name is a piece of cake. Just do a canned WordPress install. But if you’re “John Smith”, then you have a bit of work to do. Maybe someone has your name bought and won’t sell it for a reasonable price. They buy a name like first-last.com or FirstLastBlog.com. Then create a bunch of profiles at places like LinkedIn, Facebook, and various online directories to get it to reinforce. And for good measure, put up a small PPC campaign on Google and Yahoo– bidding on your name with exact match on the search network only with perhaps a 20 cent max CPC and a $1 daily limit.

If there are bad things about you in the press and you want to push those results down, you may have to create a few sites. One neat trick I’ve used is to post video snippets at places like youtube and propeller with that person’s name in the title and tags. In once instance, I grabbed 4 of the top 10 search results within 24 hours through video alone, for a client who had some pretty bad stuff on Google’s first page. Then by posting on free press release, plus some more blog content, cleared the remaining results– so that we owned all 10 first page rankings. One other affiliate colleague had some business partners who got drunk at a party, got banned, and that behavior was posted on a major forum. We used the video tricks here and got it cleaned out in a few weeks– which is longer than you’d normally expect. Like I was saying before, sometimes it takes only 24 hours or just a few minutes, if you’re lucky.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this tidbit. There are folks out there who are real pro’s at this– I’m merely sharing my own experience and what’s worked for me. If you have questions you’d like to ask me or want to read more of my articles, just drop me a line at my blog.