SEO Horror Story #3
A few years ago I was hired to do reputation management / SEO for an industrial supplier to the hospital industry. This ($50M) company had serious problems with SERPs on Google. 6/10 listings were slanderous rants by previous salespeople hiding behind anonymous personas in powerful forums. It was a mess and I wanted a challenge.
My relationship began with Ms. X, a friend of a previous associate who was brilliant. She understood everything I told her about SEO and ORM. She started helping with content creation and link building resources. I was STOKED.
In the first few weeks I did a bunch of on-page SEO and profile work. Progress came quickly on the SERPs. I had the negative posts down to 3/10 with some low-hanging fruit SEO work, profile entries, etc.. This on-page SEO had also boosted them to #2 for their key functional phrase and we obtained a full set of sitelinks as well.
Three powerful forum posts remained – ranking at #3 and #4, and they included personal attacks on executives and false claims of lawsuits and investigations by the FTC among other lies. As I usually do, I found the forum’s use policies and, armed with a list of violations, sent a diplomatic email to the forum administrators. A week or so later, the slander was gone.
The administrators refused to take off all posts – the remaining ones were non-slanderous, so I turned to the task of pushing them down. I could not see outranking them with existing off-domain content (mostly just press releases) so I told the company I needed to launch two web properties and a solid linkbuilding plan.
Ms. X was making things happen. She had linked me up to high powered contacts to universities and more. I had the best list of linkbuilding friends for these new properties I’ve ever seen – contacts at GOV and EDU sites as well as some powerful ORGs. Three months in and I had nearly solved the ORM issues for a $50 million company right before they entered talks with a huge investor. It was a high point in my SEO career.
THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS
Then I got a phone call. Ms. X was promoted to Exec VP and Mr. Y (director) took her place. The CEO of the company asked me to make contact with Mr. Y and to stop talking with Ms. X about the SEO project as her new position was requiring most of her time. No problem. I prepared a transition meeting to bring him up to speed.
PHONE CALL (this is nearly actual content)
Mr Y: We hired you to get rid of those entries in Google but they are still there.
Me: That’s what we’re doing. You can’t just “get rid of them” – we have to create new content use to push them down in the search engines. I need your company writers to help me with that and they have already provided solid outlines for two, 25-page. This is the vehicle we’ll use to push down the offensive links.
Mr. Y: THEY ARE TOO BUSY FOR THIS. We hired you to clean up Google for us, and these negative posts are still there after THREE MONTHS.
Me: Actually, this usually takes much longer, but we’ve already achieved a great deal. I’ll forward you the work we’ve done. On the content issue, you are a regulated industry so Ms. X has said that your internal staff must produce the content and it must be vetted legally.
Mr. Y: You already have content – our website has lots of content to use!
Me: You cannot use that. Google requires that unique content be on each site and we need to make the product sites more “useful” and less “salesy.” They cannot just be advertising pitches or nobody will link to them. This is why we are in touch with the scientists who were involved in development. We want some solid resources pages they won’t mind linking to.
Mr. Y: 4-5 pages is plenty to describe our products. Our brochures have lots of content in them.
Me: I have your brochures and they are strictly sales copy. And, google will ignore a 4-5 page website. We need rich content with deep details, and then we need to acquire links to that new content at a natural pace.
Mr. Y: THEY ARE TOO BUSY to build a 20 page website. We have to find another way. I am going to ask legal to send a C&D to the forums and get those posts off of there.
Me: That is not how it works and is not advised. The forum is powerful and protected by free speech, and I have reason to believe that journalists are using it for stories. We already got rid of the slanderous posts… It could blow up in your face if they tell the community that you’re strong-arming them and that could be a P.R. nightmare right as you’re working on new equity investment programs.
Mr. Y: They can’t mention our company in those posts like that. We need to get them off of there.
Me: Look, my plan will accomplish what you want, but it requires that we build the properties and do link building on it to push them off the first page. It takes time but it works. I’m happy to give you a short presentation on linkbuilding and such. Would you like that?
Mr. Y: No, I’m too busy for that. (now, really pissed off and almost yelling) Listen, in the months since we hired you, you’ve got nothing done. You’ve made promises you’ve not kept.
Me: The issue is that you joined the team late and I’ve not been able to provide you any information about how SEO works so you’ll work with me. I’ve found that this type of education is really important. Ms. X has already agreed with our plan. Have you talked to her?
Mr. Y: She’s not in this project anymore. You need to just do what I tell you. Our CEO is pissed off – he saw the forum listings showing at #1 and #2 position on Google when I was showing him.
Me: Oh dear…Did he turn off personalized search? It’s actually really hard to log completely out of Google sometimes due to chat and other tools being left on. He needs to add a couple of special characters to the end of the search string.
Mr. Y: He doesn’t have time for that stuff. All he knows is that the listings were at the top of Google when we were in his office.
Me: Oh dear. It’s important that he realize that the listings for the forums are actually at position 6 and 7 for most users. Could we have a conference call so I could clear up any confusion and help do more representative searches? He seemed really pleased with progress last time.
Mr. Y: No. Now what else do you need?
Me: I asked your I.T. department to set up hosting for the new sites more than 6 weeks ago. I have followed up three times and never received one reply. Will you check on that? Setting up hosting on the two different hosts takes around 15 minutes on each.
Mr. Y: Can’t we just put these on our current site? We already have hosting set up. We don’t want to spend more for website hosting.
Me: Your main site already ranks #1. We need to build out new properties that are hosted independently that can become a vehicle for more rankings. New hosting is a negligible expense considering that hundreds of your customers are seeing these bad listings every day.
Me: I really think I should give you my 2 hour primer on SEO and ORM. I need you as an advocate and it feels like you’re working against me right now. I’ll be happy to fly in and do a half day briefing. I know you joined the project late and I want to help this get back on track – SEO takes a while to really understand.
Mr. Y: Ms. X told me what was going on and I don’t have time for a meeting. The only thing that is not happening is that you’re not doing what we told you. This is really pissing me off. We are going to ask our agency to build these sites.
Me: Great! My work is not about building websites – it’s about SEO and linkbuilding. Will you allow the agency to build them using unique content from the writers?
Mr. Y: They already have our brochures to work from.
MY CAREER LOW POINT
At this point, I was ending my agreement period. This company was going to be a crown achievement for my abilities in ORM. I was hoping to have glowing references that I could use to propel me into the world of ORM and perhaps to find new pharma clients. And what’s worse is that this client was a referral from a close friend and powerful private equity person.
In addition, I lost 20% of my annual income due to a chaotic cloud of confusion, bureaucracy and legal saber rattling.
This is just terrible. I couldnt imagine doing all this hard work, and it sounds like you did a great job, only to get some new management to completely run you through the mud and discount you for all the effort.