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Defamation from Google Suggest and Yahoo! Suggest

by cascades
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
What can you do to defend yourself and your company against egregious cases of merit-less Google Suggest and Yahoo! Suggest defamation? (mislabeling you/your company a scam)

What if all the normal reputation management strategies (blogging, articles, videos, social networking, etc.) are futile?

Are there any credible reputation management firms that could uncover whether a malicious competitor might be BlackHat-manipulating fabricated "searches" to influence Google Suggest and Yahoo! Suggest?

Note: During the time period immediately preceding this, the AdWords KW suggestion tool saw an inexplicable spike in searches for our company founder and main product name during the past few months. (no new campaigns, nothing viral, nothing that could possibly explain a 3-4x increase in these 2 incredibly-niched long-tail searches)

One more key thing: NOTHING in the SERPS would even remotely suggest that our founder or company name has even minor reputation management problems. (Google and Yahoo! both say Suggest gathers from "popular" searches. But can searches really be popular if nothing in the SERPs backs up the "popular" assertion?!?)

Any thoughts/suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!
#defamation #google #suggest #yahoo
  • Profile picture of the author debra
    Originally Posted by cascades View Post

    What can you do to defend yourself and your company against egregious cases of merit-less Google Suggest and Yahoo! Suggest defamation? (mislabeling you/your company a scam)
    Most of those searches are gathered from news media sites. And, thier suggestion tools are approx. 30 days behind itself too.

    What if all the normal reputation management strategies (blogging, articles, videos, social networking, etc.) are futile?
    New content has to be beefed up for the search engines to overcome some of the aged results that have been linked to. That's where social bookmarking and submittion comes into play. Never assume that new content that is freash will outrank previous, matured content, especially if it comes from an authority site.

    Are there any credible reputation management firms that could uncover whether a malicious competitor might be BlackHat-manipulating fabricated "searches" to influence Google Suggest and Yahoo! Suggest?
    Sure...got money?

    Note: During the time period immediately preceding this, the AdWords KW suggestion tool saw an inexplicable spike in searches for our company founder and main product name during the past few months. (no new campaigns, nothing viral, nothing that could possibly explain a 3-4x increase in these 2 incredibly-niched long-tail searches)
    Rule One: Offline News Media fuels Online Search Activity. Fortunatly, in some cases, it is short term.

    One more key thing: NOTHING in the SERPS would even remotely suggest that our founder or company name has even minor reputation management problems. (Google and Yahoo! both say Suggest gathers from "popular" searches. But can searches really be popular if nothing in the SERPs backs up the "popular" assertion?!?)

    Any thoughts/suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!
    Actually, that works to your favor. Someone makes a search to find deflamatory info on a person/product and only finds nutral or positive feed back. This could be a sales closer for you. Try to find a creative way to use that to your advantage.

    Example would be to encourage/provoke your prospect to find something deflamatory about you by providing the Google/Yahoo Suggestion url in an anchor link somewhere in your copy.
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  • Profile picture of the author Heather2008
    A website I manage has the exact same issue. The word "scam" comes up as a suggestion. I noticed other similar companies have the same word come up as well so its not directly related to us. There has to be a way to manipulate Google Suggest results. I am afraid that if I optimize" mycompany.com scam" that it may give Google Suggest MORE reason to include it in their Suggested results. I have seen from some results I tested that there are meaningless results offered too like the domain (with the .com) plus 4-5 words that have no connection to the site, company, or any other related company. This is evident in the results from the "suggested" site. An example of this would be as random as "domain.com" plus the words egg, rock, candle, and soccor (misspelled). Now really.. how many searches could have been done with that combination to get this as a Google Suggest result? Doesnt make sense to me........

    Do you know which online news sites or other sites that "directly" affect these searches in Google Suggest?

    Do you know if optimizing my domain with negative words encourages Google Suggest to include them in those results?
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