Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Google’s latest hype is all about creating a Google Profile. They suggest requesting that happy customers complete reviews of your business to add to your online rep, and also advise writing and publishing positive content about yourself to ensure there is plenty of ‘good’ out there.

Google offers tips on how to “get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see.” The blog post to that effect has ticked some long term SEOs and webmasters off – they feel it is ethically questionable to  create and optimize content solely for the purpose of topping the SERPs and shoving negative content of the front page.

The war over what constitutes ethical ‘reputation management’ rages on, but as Matt McGee put it, perhaps “Google is trying to do some pre-emptive customer service here. You can imagine the amount of emails (and perhaps phone calls) Google gets from people who are upset about what they see when they Google themselves.”

The Google blog post states:

Think twice before putting your personal information online. Remember that although something might be appropriate for the context in which you’re publishing it, search engines can make it very easy to find that information later, out of context, including by people who don’t normally visit the site where you originally posted it. Translation: don’t assume that just because your mom doesn’t read your blog, she’ll never see that post about the new tattoo you’re hiding from her.

I find this funny, as they want you to fill out a Google profile, and always seem to want everything possible online – but maybe they are tired of endless emails asking for content to be removed, not to mention lawsuits. The post goes on to disclaim responsibility:

If something you dislike has already been published, the next step is to try to remove it from the site where it’s appearing. Rather than immediately contacting Google, it’s important to first remove it from the site where it’s being published. Google doesn’t own the Internet; our search results simply reflect what’s already out there on the web. Whether or not the content appears in Google’s search results, people are still going to be able to access it — on the original site, through other search engines, through social networking sites, etc. — if you don’t remove it from the original site. You need to tackle this at the source.