Some great posts have already been written on the subject of reputation management in the SERPs via the creation of profiles at numerous sites like Blogger, Squidoo, MySpace, Technorati, Yahoo! 360, Flickr, et al. My favorites are:
But, another issue exists as a correlary to these “reputation management” techniques. How ethical is it to control the search results for someone else through profile creation and SEO?
For example, let’s say you’re a publisher, selling a book by Otis Waftengard. Otis builds a site to sell his book and you, the publisher, place his book for sale on your site. As a business move, you decide that it’s valuable to have Otis’ book on your site outrank his personal site, since you can then take a higher percentage of the revenue. Otis isn’t too savvy about SEO, but you decide to build links and get noticed for selling Otis’ book.
If you employ tactics like the use of Flickr, MySpace, Blogger, Squidoo, etc. to build profiles (ostensibly of Otis Waftengard) and place links back to your site, have you been deceptive? manipulative? unethical?
Obviously, if you were a competitor of Otis’, writing about the same subject and you chose to smirch his online reputation by creating misleading or negative pages about him, you’d be in unethical territory. But, if the difference comes down to where the links point and who controls the content, is there a difference?
What would you do fi a client wanted to control the search results for a proper name without that person’s permission/agreement?
