StepRep Blog

Today, people Google each other on a regular basis. If you have a job interview, the employer has Googled you. If you offer a service, your prospective customers have Googled you before they phoned. If you have an introductory business meeting, the other party has likely researched you online. This is why Online Reputation Management (ORM) is critical today. While ORM is a broader topic, what we’re talking about right now is managing the Google-ability of your name, or rather, how easy it is to find you on Google and what people will see – your Google profile if you will. Now of course this discussion includes other search engines, but Google has become the verb ‘to search’ now so I’ll keep referring to Google. I’m going to split this discussion into 2 posts and focus on the background that links play in search for this post. The next post, I’ll get into actually building your profile.

The topic on how links work is rather old news to many, but complicated enough to leave many others still in the dark. I’m going to discuss this at a high level. Google ranks the relevance of a page by many factors. In general, a page is ranked based on it’s topical relevance to a keyword search and how many links point to that page. The most important factor would be the links a page has pointing to it. Here is what makes a link valuable:

1.The Page Rank (PR) of the Page the Link is From

The more popular a page is, the more valuable links from that page will be. Google has a patented algorithm that calculates the popularity of a page. You can see the page rank of a page using the Google toolbar on a scale of 1-10. This number is not the actual PR that Google uses, but it shows you the ballpark popularity of a page.

The idea here is that if you receive a link from a well established, popular page, that link will give your site more value than a brand new page or a page with few or no links pointing to it.

2.The Number of Other Links on the Linking Page

The value of a link on a page is diluted by the total number of other links on that page. For example, if a page has a page rank of 5 and there is only one outgoing link on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5. But if there are 99 other links on that page, that link will carry a relative value of 5/100.

3.The Topic of the Linking Page

This point is simple. If my blog is all about real estate in Denver, a link from another Denver real estate site (or page) is more valuable than a link from a casino site.

4.The Text of the Link

This is a big one. Link text matters a lot. So a link to my Denver real estate site that looks like this: Denver Real Estate, is a lot better than a link that is formatted like this: click here.

5.The Reputation of the Linking Site

This relates to point three. Google gives websites a relative weighting based on the links they attract and the sites they link to. The idea is that they recognize the types of ‘neighbourhoods’ you associate with. So if a link comes from a site with a good reputation, the link will carry more weight than a link from a spammy site. For clarity, if a site is linking to other low value sites and receives links from those sites, its links will carry less value than a site that is being linked to from CNN, Yahoo, educational institutions etc.

Take a look here for a more in-depth discussion on building links:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002357.html

In the next post, I’ll use some more examples of the above concepts and show you how to build out a strong profile to increase the Googlability of your name.

There was a story in the New York Times about Belkin paying people for writing positive reviews.  This was an interesting story to me.  Apparently, a Belkin employee was paying people to write favorable reviews on sites like Amazon.  The general reaction was very negative and a  general concensus was that this represents very poor reputation management practices.  But I began to take a more critical look at this and wondered how it was really different from other forms of advertising.

1.  How is the intention different from a company paying for an ad in certain media and claiming a poor product is very good?  Consider a company that has consumer reports, community feedback and perhaps even internal research which confirms to them that their product or service is poor.

2.  How is this different from an infomercial where a well know personality is paid to endorse a product or service?

3.  Is this different from a company paying a subject matter expert for a product review.  Consider different types of marketing arrangements.  Sometimes an expert is paid money for a review and sometimes there is a mutual co-marketing arrangement in place.

4.  Consider companies that pay people to send business their way on a referral basis.  Have you ever been to a place like Cancun Mexico and if you ask someone directions to a restaurant or bar, they give you a business card of a place with their initial on the back.  They are paid a referral.

5.  What about sites that just sell ads and link to ‘great services’.

I guess the key question here, is what actually makes advertising and promotion reputable?

This week on SEOMOZ.org, Rand Fishkin and company discussed reputation management in a couple of posts as it pertains to SEO (search engine optimization) strategies.  First, I should note that to many experts in the search marketing industry, SEO is a term that describes a much broader set of goals rather than just optimizing content for search; rather it’s a whole philosophy for web design and marketing that balances search, user experience and brand perception.

In a post called “The 6 Goals of SEO: Choosing the Right Ones for Your Business“, he lists SEO for reputation management as one of the goals.  First he explains what SEO for reputation management means – basically it involves trying to get positive comments about you or your company ranked in search engines above any negative comments.  I should add, for people that generally have positive information about them online, it involves getting the most relevant and desired references ranking as high as possible.

This can be a challenging process and the obvious need in this work is the ability to save and categorize online references about you.  This is a simple but important feature that we’ve added to our reputation manager (StepRep).  Today, you can set up Google Alerts, but you have no way to save or categorize results in an organized way.  Placing the valuable references on your StepRep profile, helps provide crawlable links to those references and thus helps to promote them in search.

StepRep Beta Helps You Monitor, Manage, and Build Your Reputation.

SASKATOON, SK, January 8 2009 – With the explosive growth of new social media like Facebook and Twitter, it’s never been more vital for businesses to keep track of what people are saying about them on the Internet.

“People are rating your services on sites like ServiceMagic and Yelp,” said Brendan King, CEO of the Canadian Internet startup MyFrontSteps. “They’re blogging, and commenting on each other’s blogs. One comment can be seen by tens of thousands of people. It’s really upped the stakes.”

MyFrontSteps has just released a new service called StepRep, located at steprep.myfrontsteps.com, to help small businesses and independent contractors manage their online reputation. What makes this service different from others that have come before?

The price, for one thing. StepRep is free. And it was designed with simplicity in mind, to encourage non-tech-savvy users to give it a try.

“Small business owners might think, hey, I’ve got a low profile, no-one’s talking about me,” said King. “But when you don’t have a large online presence, the effect of each comment is magnified. It’s even more important to keep on top of what people are seeing when they Google your name.”

StepRep sends out an alert via email whenever a new result appears, allowing users to respond to blog posts or comments immediately.

Results can then be sorted and managed, and positive items promoted using a “widget” that can be added to the user’s blog or website. These search-friendly widgets draw search engines toward positive results and away from negative ones.

For users without a blog or website, StepRep provides a simple profile page that displays positive stories.

StepRep is only the first part of a larger strategy to connect businesses and their customers through social networks. In March, MyFrontSteps will launch Homebook, a place for homeowners to share photos of their homes and get ideas for design and renovation. Homebook users will be invited to link to their trusted home service providers on StepRep.

StepRep and MyFrontSteps are products of VendAsta Technologies, a software development team based in Saskatoon, Canada. In August 2008 the startup received $3 million funding from Victoria Park Capital to develop a social networking initiative that would combine the founders’ expertise in software and real estate services. Their website is at www.vendasta.com.

For more information please contact MyFrontSteps CEO Brendan King at 306-955-5512 ext 102.