How to Deal with a Ripoff Report Listing

Our VIP(erchill) column features real online reputation issues that people find themselves in and offers advice on how to deal with them. You could call it VIP treatment, and it’s free. For more posts on this column go to the VIP Category.

For this blog entry, we are looking at the widely discussed Ripoff Report and steps you can take to Deal with a Ripoff Report Listing, welcome to the first ever post in our VIP column, hope you enjoy!

For those who don’t know, Ripoff Report (who will not get a link) is a site that allows people to share their displeasure with a company or its services. That all sounds fair and well, but the company seem to be employing a lot of strange tactics which include keyword stuffing and requiring payment for a listing to be removed. There are thousands of people in a poor situation because Ripoff Report are ranking highly for a lot of keywords and are costing legitimate people and businesses a lot of time and money.

Build Your Profile

Whatever you are listed for (brand / product / service name) the first thing you want to do is try to build up a profile of that around the web. What this means is creating say a blog on wordpress related to what you are defending, a profile on MySpace and even a lens on Squidoo, anything that talks about your company in a positive light and on a site that has some authority to rank well in search engines.

This is not easy as Ripoff Report has a lot of domain authority and holds some pretty good rankings in Google. One of the best ways to at least push them down a notch or two is to create more tailored pages to your brand / product on your own actual website. If you have any basic SEO you should be ranking no.1 for them anyway, created a few relevant and targeted pages on your domain and link through to them from the homepage.

File a Rebuttal

They are ‘nice’ enough to give you the option to respond to negative criticism on the site (and I have seen examples of this), whether they let anything show or how long this takes I’m unsure. It’s definitely worth a try though as people are probably going to stumble on that listing whether you like it or not.

In their words: “On the contrary, you can write a rebuttal explaining your position. Rebuttals are 100% free, and we strongly encourage you to use this resource since they can be extremely effective. “

Help Get them Out of Google

The reason the listings on the site are such an issue of course is because they are ranking highly for a lot of sensitive searches. As Rand Fishkin pointed out in the link at the top, they are breaking a lot of Google guidelines (including cloaking) and should be removed from the index or at least have less authority.

If this sounds like something you are willing to try, the boys over at distilled are heading this motion.

In Summary

No matter how hard SEO’s try, these listings probably aren’t getting out of the index anytime soon. The best step now would be to file a rebuttal so that it’s shown on the site and then start trying to get other pages on your site and pages from other sites to begin ranking highly for your precious keywords.

Oh, and if the listing is negative and true. Clean up your act first.

44 Comments / January 30th, 2008 / Reputation

8 Types of Reputation Management Issues

Reputation Management is a serious online service that needs timely attention, although not enough people do it justice and simply monitor feeds online for mentions of said brand / product / service. There’s many forms of ‘negative reputation’ online and this blog post is going to cover a few that crop up from time to time and some you may not be aware of.

1. Logo Infringement

Companies like BMW will no doubt have some form of copyright / trademark protection for their logo and if they were a client of mine I would make it clear that others are using their logo for their own benefit. Just look at this example I found for a site named ‘Blog Money Wiki’.

The original logo is on the right, not much difference

Of course for something like this we would have to get in touch with a legal team before taking any serious action if it is deemed to be affecting the brand. I think a simple email to the site owner might just do though.

2. Bidding on Trademarked Terms via PPC

Any company that has a trademark on it’s brand name has the right to get in touch with the relevant search engine to stop people bidding on their terms, especially if proved to be affecting them. For examples of a site that has issues you could try a huge window company in the UK named ‘Velux’.

As a reputation management company, the best we could do in this situation is actually advise a company on the exact steps to take as this can only be solved by the company actually filing this process.

3. Negative Social Network Groups

It’s all well and good when a company is raving about your brand, but what about when it turns negative and gets in front of a large amount of people. This is a big issue but it’s something I’ve had experience dealing with personally with a lot of success, I’m going to be doing a blog post on how to deal with each of these issues in the future. Motorola for one could do with some help regarding facebook groups.

Here is our guide to dealing with negative social network groups.
4.Harmful Forum Feedback

In my experience when finding negative issues online, a large percentage of people complaining about a product or service tend to do so on relevant, public forums which can rank highly in the search results. Brands can certainly benefit from managing their reputation online, especially when people are going to forums and saying their account has been hacked, like in the case of Digg below.

5. Micro sites Criticising a Brand

Believe it or not, people will go as far as setting up new websites just to share their displeasure and hatred towards a brand or the product it offers. One good example includes Paypal Sucks, which ranks highly for the term paypal. In South Africa, a company named Telkom provides the majority of their communications, they are awful to be honest so there’s no surprise a site named ‘Hellkom‘ was set-up to talk about just that.

6. Negative Blog Posts

Just like forums, this is a huge contributor to negative feedback online as it’s so easy for people to setup a blog and talk about anything they like, in fact it probably accounts for the majority of mentions. A simple search like in the image below can reveal a lot of negativity for a brand on blogs, in this example it’s UK phone network o2.

That was just for an ‘intitle search’, if you take that out there are a lot more relevant results. For tips on how to deal with this issue see our post on ‘How to Deal with Negative Blog Posts‘.

7. General Search Results

People do actually search for issues or negative terms when undecided on using a company over the internet, or even use the internet just to research a company for offline purposes. Taking all the terms like ’sucks, rubbish, problems’ out of the equation, there can still be bad results when just typing in a brand name which is even worse; Paypal is a good example of this.

For tips on how to deal with this issue see our post on ‘How to Deal with Negative Search Engine Results‘.
8. Review Sites

When helping clean up negative results online these can certainly be the hardest to deal with. They tend to rank highly especially for review related terms which is what people often search for when deciding on whether to go with a service or choose a certain product. This example looks at how Samsung could be losing sales due to a negative online reputation.

This isn’t every issue you are going to find but does include most of them, I will be doing a post on how to handle each of these situations.

25 Comments / January 28th, 2008 / Reputation

Digg’s $300m Mistake? - Reputation Management

I love social media, but I also have a bit of a passion for reputation management that I’ve never really explored or shared online. It’s a bit of a shame that there’s no hugely popular sole focused reputation management blogs online and I probably won’t be the first (unless Andy counts) so there’s certainly a risk. Reading quicksprout recently I decided to ‘roll the dice‘ and start sharing a side of Search Engine Marketing / Social Media that I don’t think gets covered enough and it’s something I believe I can do in a unique way whilst still connecting with readers. Starting with this post.

With pretty much everyone from Valleywag to TechCrunch talking about Digg’s $300m price tag (which may or may not be true but recent site changes to increase pageviews make me a believer) I started wondering why this huge, popular website wasn’t snapped up straight away.

Digg Doesn’t Listen to It’s Users

Firstly we have fair, and open requests from one of it’s top submitters. An Open Letter to Kevin Rose

• Domains clearly being on some sort of auto-bury
• Kevin Rose has a 101% popular stories ratio
• Get in touch with the top submitters and thank them

The auto-bury feature was talked about in lots of places, simply because if it’s true (which it certainly seems) then it’s pointless people wasting their time to submit the story from a certain website if there’s no chance it can make the homepage of the site.

One of the reasons that people are talking about digg negatively on these blogs is that digg has no support and people have to come up with their own conclusions. I can’t count how many times I’ve read people say ‘digg never replied’, now I’m sure they get a lot of emails but this was the same over a year ago, at least give some textbook response.

Active Submitters are Being Banned

As Tamar rightly stated, active submitters are critical to Digg’s success and giving most of them no reason to their ban certainly doesn’t help the matter. When you’ve spent tens if not hundreds of hours on a website for your account just to disappear (and without reason), people are going to:

• Talk about it on their own websites
• Try to spread the word to other Digg users
• Stop using the site and move elsewhere

Its Come to Bite them in the Ass

If Digg are looking for a sale; it’s not working. This is for a number of reasons, the site revolves too much around Kevin Rose for the likes of Diggnation, they have had no system to get in touch with their users or at least give decent feedback to things that are being said about them online and now there’s plenty of people talking about why they shouldn’t be bought.

Now if only they had someone to monitor this for them from the start, Digg would be a much better place today.

Update: This is a start, but not nearly enough.

One Comment / January 25th, 2008 / Reputation

5 Feeds We Monitor for Clients

I like offering Reputation Management as a service, probably because it’s something that can really be used by thousands of companies and doesn’t require as much stress (usually) than services like SEO when things aren’t going your way. I use Google Reader to track a number of feeds for around 10 sites. Here’s how the monitoring tends to go:

Read the rest of this entry »

16 Comments / January 21st, 2008 / Reputation

5 Free Brand Monitoring Solutions

Observation into the current conversation is something I recommend to all companies before they go out there and try to get some of the online activities to work in their favour. Social Media is a two way conversation, so to put that more simply, you have to listen to what people are saying, before you can respond.

You can’t just speak and hope it solves all problems without knowing what you are speaking about or who you are speaking too. Therefore, I’ve came up with this short but feature-full list of sites you can use to observe the conversation around your brand.

Site: Technorati
What is it?: Technorati started by monitoring and indexing all the known blogs on the internet. They since moved into photos and video
Brand Monitoring: A simple search on technorati will find out exactly what has been said about you or by you in the blog-o-sphere. Features include a quick-view so that you can view a general look on both posts, videos and images, as well as the fact you can go into each vertical for more detailed information.

Site: Google Blog Search
What is it?: Google Blog Search is very similar to Technorati in that it tries to monitor everything being said by blogs. In the about page Google make it clear this is not just for Blogger blogs, Google owns the blogging platform known as Blogger.
Brand Monitoring: Once again you can use this to see who has been saying what about you in blogs online. What I like about Google blog search is that you can sort by most recent and most relevant to see what has been said lately but what has had the strongest mention of your brand. You can also search for specific dates so if you rolled out a new product or service anytime you can check specific reaction around your brand on those dates.

Site: Niche News Sites
What is it?: Niche news sites, such as Oil Online for the Oil industry, can be great sources of information. If you are a significant brand in a specific niche then it’s worth checking these out.
Brand Monitoring: There’s no better way to get an overview of your brand than in a news site specific to your niche. This allows you to see how your company is viewed by these media sources and allows you to compare yourself to their opinions of your competitors.

Site: Search Engines
What is it?: Search Engines, in basic form try to index as much useful content from the web as possible and return the best results for users’ search queries.
Brand Monitoring: It’s possible that you’ve found a lot of stories or issues that you would like to cover up, but how do you know where to start? I would go with the issues and feedback found on the top results of search engines for your company name and company / product / service reviews.

Site: Competition / Competitors
What is it?: Your online competitiors. Whoever is a known competitor, companies that offer similar services or products.
Brand Monitoring: Search for your competitors and find other places they are being mentioned online and see if you have been mentioned. The services above can vary in accuracy from their certain sources but certain online communities where your rivals are mentioned may also uncover discussion about you.

In Conclusion
Just incase the images distracted you from the real content, here’s the solutions again:

• Technorati
• Google Blog Search
• Niche News Sites
• Search Engines
• Competitors

There are more that I could cover and certainly will in the future, it’s possibly an opportunity for somebody to use to go into more detail to build some off-topic links, but I think Marketing Pilgrim did that pretty well.

9 Comments / September 7th, 2007 / Reputation