Ricky’s Online Business Blog

A customer asked me how to “erase” the web pages which contain negative opinion in Google search result pages about a public figure, whose perceived image is less than perfect.

Well, it’s not possible to “delete” those pages from Google (unless you get a court injunction ordering Google to do so). But he can add in more positive content about the person, and try to boost these web pages up the ranking using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

But if an individual, a business or an organization’s reputation is already bad due to their behavior, no matter how much positive content is generated, even more negative content can still get its way into the search pages. This is especially so when everyone can publish nowadays on the Internet by means of blogging.

With the advent of Internet, and social media more recently, reputation management has become very important for individuals, businesses and organizations in their branding, marketing and PR efforts.

Perhaps the best policy is do like what Google says, “Don’t be evil”. Be good and people will talk about us well on the Internet.

But in case there is any negative content, one can contact the web site owner, or participate in its forum or blog, and try to set things right, perhaps by posting feedback or comments on the web sites. Be professional and don’t hide behind anonymous email address which I believe some commentators did on this blog when I talked about them. Be respectful. Don’t point fingers and don’t lose temper.

Today we no longer can ignore what people say about us on the Internet. The long term solution is to be good and not evil. As for my customer, all the best to him for what he intends to do.

I’m trying to make a quick note why you should consider blogging for your business.

Search engine friendliness – A normal web site is “static”, meaning that it doesn’t change much over time. But a blog updated regularly can provide fresh content to the search engines. Google can crawl your web site and so update its search results more often if it has a blog.

Keywording – What keywords you want people to type in Google to find you? In blog you can stuff your blog posts with the keywords you want. A blog is ever-growing and so your keywords’ exposure grows as well.

Ease of setup – You may need a web designer to do up your web site. But with blog, there are so many free blogging software available, such as WordPress, that you don’t really need so much technical knowledge to create a blog site. DIY stands for Do It Yourself!

Ease of maintenance – With a normal web site, you may need to spend much for a web designer to update your content (maintenance is not cheap so that’s why you can see so many web sites not updated). But with a blog, you can just login any time to make changes yourself! Again, it’s free!

Low cost – You may need to spend thousands of dollars to hire a web design firm. But with blogging, web development can be literally FREE! At most, you need to pay up for your domain name, web hosting, and maybe hire someone to set up your blog. Then you are off to blogging!

So if you already have a conventional web site, I guess it’s time to add a blog to it. If you don’t have a web site yet, why not create your whole site as a blog?

Not convinced?  Find out more from OneCoach – the 3 ways how blogging can help your business.

Years ago when Google was already successful, I was in a coffee house with a friend.  We were discussing how to beat Google and build a better search engine!  We wanted to become Larry Page and Sergery Brin in Malaysia!  Ambitious, huh?

Google search result was then very much based on PageRank to calculate the “popularity” of web sites.  One main factor for the “popularity” of a web site is the number and quality of links from other web sites to it.  The more backlinks your web site has, the more “popular” it is, and so the higher ranking you will get in Google.

So how to outsmart Google?  We thought of the possibility of ranking web sites based on their traffic.  The more a web site is visited, the higher ranking it should have.  We thought of calculating “popularity” based on hits, not backlinks.

But how are we going to track the traffic?  We can’t get site owners to put a counter code on their sites.  We also can’t access their web server logs.  So finally we did nothing and dropped the idea.

But now Microsoft seems to be on similar line of thought when they proposed something called BrowseRank, which calculates popularity based on traffic and usage.  The more a web site is visited and the longer period of time it is spent on by users, the higher ranking it should have in search result.

I don’t know how they could do it.  But if they succeed to beat Google and become the number one search engine (which I think is not likely), I and my friend have only ourselves to blame for not further developing our idea.

I heard there are three kinds of people in this world – those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who don’t know what happen!  Apparently I belong to those who watch things happen!