You Don’t Mess with the SEO

It can be risky to mess with an SEO dude. It’s becoming increasingly common for employers or potential love interests to look you up online. At the same time, anyone who is proficient in search engine optimisation can quickly and easily ruin things for you. Completely anonymously, the SEO dude can make sure you never get that job interview or that the guy/girl you’re dating never contacts you again. This blog post will show how quickly and easily a knowledgeable search engine optimiser¹ can cause problems for a company or a person they dislike. A search engine optimiser working with links² doesn’t even need to take the time to blog about their nemesis. It might be enough to push up already existing pages in the search results. All of this completely anonymously and untraceably.

So-called online reputation management is still a relatively new phenomenon. But as reported by DN and SvD, four out of ten recruiters look you up online and that social media can cost you your job. Even the Employment Service writes that social media is becoming increasingly important in recruitment.

Nedan kommer några exempel på fall där personer har ”tjafsat med SEO-snubben”.

Mike Goorman

To make a long story short, a German solicitor named Mike Goorman managed to really irritate me a few years ago. I had just acquired a German domain. A site was created on the domain and all was well. Then I received a pre-written email with incorrect claims³ about the site’s content from a certain Mr. Mike Goorman. When the error was pointed out, more oddities and demands⁴ followed. Furthermore, Goorman ignored my questions and made sure to block my domain extra quickly when my response did not please him⁵. My work with the domain was thus wasted. No big deal, but I chose to blog about it all (now deleted) and ensure the post appeared at the top of the search results for searches on “mike goorman”.
A few months later, I received a new email from Mr. Goorman stating that they would immediately activate the domain without any of the previous demands. My blog was not mentioned at this stage. The domain was activated again and all was well. Not unexpectedly, however, I was contacted again and asked to remove the blog post. Up to this point, the solicitors had behaved well. They had fixed the original problem and asked me to remove the negative information from the internet.

But then they messed it up by using a trick that seems common among solicitors active on the internet. Suddenly, I received emails from two different solicitors at the same firm. They tried to put more pressure on me⁶. The icing on the cake was Mike Goorman couldn’t resist sending a little threat:

Believe me, I do not wish to escalate this matter… -Mike Goorman

Mike Goorman is correct in that he does not want to escalate. He would only risk a Streisand effect; that the negative information spreads even more as a direct consequence of attempting to remove it with threats or lawsuits.
Enough about Mike Goorman, the next man to shave is…

Johan Ripås

So-called Google cleaning has become fashionable, and soon SVT will show the documentary “You Are Googled” (Airs 22 March). In the documentary, Johan attempts to ensure that anyone googling the name “Johan Ripås“ first sees Johan’s own pages about himself. It’s the same problem as in the case of Mike Goorman where you want to remove problematic information from the search results. But if it’s not possible to remove the negative information, then the aim is to fill up the search results with own pages with tailored information.

In the case of Johan Ripås, it mainly concerns two highly negative pages. One is a blog post by Alex Schulman accusing Johan of using both creative editing techniques and falsehoods to produce interesting content for his documentary Knarkfeber (Not online but there’s a seemingly dead torrent here). And then another article contains information about Johan having used a similar setup for securing an interview for the documentary Fur Hunters. It also appears that criticism from the Wikipedia entry about Johan Ripås has been cleaned from an IP at SVT. See the discussion on Wikipedia here and the original Wikipedia entry here.

I’m not alone in observing that Johan’s main problem isn’t just that people write negatively about him, but that they actually seem to have grounds for doing so. Just as the Google cleaning began to show results, someone started linking to the two negative articles, and promptly pushed them back to the first page of the search results again.

Another somewhat lighter case is…

Unni Drougge

Unni Drougge wrote about search engine consultants in a column on IDG. The column contains conscious or unconscious factual errors⁷, sharpens issues⁸ and provokes in a way that is common among columnists who otherwise struggle to be seen. Doing so is typically called link baiting or possibly trolling among search engine optimisers. It’s simply about concocting something that garners enough attention for other bloggers or writers to spontaneously link to the bait. Unni Drougge has succeeded 100% here and hats off to a successful venture.
Unni Drougge’s column then goes on to write that someone will be angry and register unnidrougge.net. This provocation also succeeds and indeed someone anonymously registers the domain and creates the page. However, the page turns out to be a harmless link bait in itself (which this article falls for), but still demonstrates how quickly and easily one can set up an anonymous page in someone else’s name.

Johanna Sjödin

At the same time, the example shows how easy and quick it could be to really create problems similar to those that have afflicted Johanna Sjödin; another person with the same name has a blog that frightens people, and this has created problems for the first mentioned Johanna Sjödin.

The examples above are still relatively kind, factual, and do not use any real nastiness. However, a sufficiently agitated search engine optimiser could write completely fabricated things under their alter ego’s name. They could create fake articles with very compromising content and post them on sites that look entirely trustworthy. Opinion articles, blogs, and forum posts pushed up in the search results could become a veritable nightmare to deal with.

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Footnotes

1. Search Engine Optimiser. A person who ensures a website or specific page is visible in Google’s search results.

2. Links. The links you click on to go to the website they point to. A page that many other pages link to often ranks among the first pages in Google’s search results.

3. Examples of incorrect statements from Mike Goorman, with explanation.

As you know, World of Warcraft is a trademark registered by Blizzard Entertainment Inc

The domain does not contain the trademark “World of Warcraft”.

Furthermore, Blizzard declares in their general terms and conditions, that the sale of gold and the use of power-leveling services violates their terms of use and the end user license Agreement and they regularly take action to appropriate measures to punish violations

…we would like to verify that you are entitled by Blizzard Inc. to use the domain name you have registered and furthermore to sell wow-gold and offer power-leveling services.

Here Mike Goorman states that my site sells gold and power leveling. Neither is sold on the site. That Blizzard would regularly go after domain owners who actually sell gold or power leveling is also a fiction.

4. More oddities from Mike Goorman.

You have the possibility to exchange the admin-c by giving us the full contact data (name, address, phone, email) of a person with a place of general jurisdiction in Germany. Please also provide us with a copy of his identity card.

My German partner did not want to send a copy of his ID card, and it is not a requirement for registering .de domains.

5. Mike Goorman Blocks the domain.

since we do not expect further sufficient response from you by the set deadline, we will deactivate the domain immediately.

6. Schollmeyer & Rickert tactic to apply more pressure: Two different lawyers from the same firm contact me simultaneously. This is a common tactic when lawyers try to persuade sites to remove unwanted content.

7. Unni Drougge factual errors:

If I linked there, they would link to my blog. If a hundred people link to a poker site, it links further to a link farm that links back.

It’s a bit like nitpicking, but in this case, the poker site does not link to the link farm. It’s a minor point but shows that Unni does not understand what she is writing about.

…they write that I eat feces and then write my name many times in the meta tag, title tag, and category tag. Then it’s that page that appears if you search for Unni Drougge.

Writing something many times in the meta tag (which meta tag?) and title tag does not make the page rank higher. There is no such thing as a category tag at all.

 
8. Unni Drougge sharpens:

Therefore, a war between SEO and Google is ongoing.

Google actually encourages search engine optimisation. It’s not accurate to generalise in this way.