Recently a local business owner (who I won’t identify because it would make things worse) was referred to me about how to remove an autocomplete result in reference to his business. eg. ‘Long Island Tennis Tournament Referee Bribed’

How does autocomplete work? Google claims that it is mostly driven by actual user searches but may have a combination of actual user searches, past search history and rising popular searches. We have evidence that it combines terms that are not necessarily adjacent and does filter out terms like ‘scam’. For more information on how autocomplete works, see this Search Engine Land article.

Some factors:

1. Volume of searches
2. Click through rate (CTR)
3. Volume of results of nearby searches

First of all, be honest. Is the autocomplete actually referencing the truth? eg. Was a referee for the Long Island actually bribed? If not, then go find out what the sites that are showing up for that term are actually using for content. Is it computer generated garbage? Is it a forum of disgruntled customers that you need to deal with? If so, then it is a bit tougher.

Can I manipulate Autcomplete results? Yes. But it will cost you. Last year Brent Payne, former Chicago Tribune SEO, used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to manipulate a search term of his own and got himself banned from autcomplete mostly because he pissed off Matt Cutts (Google’s head of Web Spam) for good reason.

Reputation management firms are quick to fix the problem by burying the bad term with artificially boosting a nicer term by using similar methods and writing content for it. The problem is that (much like Rogaine) you have to keep paying to keep the bad term away.

Sometimes the term is replaced by a more recent or popular term naturally. Other ways to accelerate this effect can be publicity stunts or viral marketing.

What is Google doing to help?

Despite some legal requirements in various countries, Google has apparently had enough of business owners freaking out over suggestions and has removed ‘scam’ in some autocomplete results and has removed piracy related terms like ‘bittorrent’. For a time the term ‘lesbians’ was blocked too.

Second, ask yourself what you are willing to do. If you have the resources to write multiple versions of content about a replacement phrase and distribute it cleverly across multiple domains that have pagerank and actually have ‘dofollow’ links, then maybe it is worth the time. It could be the online marketing kick start you should have done years ago.

If you don’t have those crazy resources, hire them out, but ask important questions. Reputation management firms will most likely have a two prong approach 1) They will tell you, or hopefully write themselves, a lot of content for the web that creates a new phrase that will hypothetically (and temporarily) bump the bad phrase down with a bunch of innocuous phrases that don’t alarm prospective customers. 2) They will get these phrases popular on the user side by making various users and robots (like Brent Payne did above) do the preferred search term that will be corroborated with the content they wrote. This simulates a ‘trend’ and will hopefully replace the nasty suffix. This will not be permanent as they need to keep the search volume up and the content fresh by continuing to write about this artificial trend to keep ahead of the offending theme.

Be sure to get complete answers to the following questions:

1. What happens after the campaign is complete? Are the effects permanent and why or why not?
2. Does this run a risk of having my site penalized by Google?

Third, deal with it head on. This is more of a PR strategy than an SEO straegy, but time and time again we see that SEO and PR cross paths at the worst times. If the suggestion has a drop of truth to it, you may wish to work on the SEO for that term. Get to the top of the results for the high CTR nasty term and do your best to control the message, explain what happened, how you fixed it (hopefully you did), and why it isn’t an issue any longer.

Other reading: http://www.beattheautocomplete.com/

How have you dealt with Google Autocomplete?

Comment below!

For those of you that do not follow such nerd-dom, it is worth restating that  in mid September Google changed the way the Adwords Keyword Tool compiled data. Simply put, the end result of your PPC campaigns did not change, but the estimate of the data from the Keyword Tool will now be significantly reduced. This is because the search volume estimate is  now coming from google.com results only, not the included partners like ask.com and aol.com.

This is significant because certain people use certain search engines. I have noticed for  years that Yahoo is used by older generations and depending on your keywords, and ad copy, your click through rate will show that.

It is always important to get a second opinion with other tools like wordtracker and using your own analytics. At the least, update your projections based on the new data.

You know how politicians often break out the “tax ax“?
I think I’m going to coin the “buzzword bazooka“

If ‘pride goes before the fall’, then buzzwords go before pride.

If you work with search engines, you should probably know a few languages including HTML (I know it’s only markup!), PHP and Javascript. You don’t need to be fluent in PHP or Javascript, but you should at least know how to order dinner and find the toilet.

The fact is that search engine theory is just that, theory. Only a very few number of people know exactly how Google, MSNbot and Yahoo (soon to be Bing/MSNbot) crawlers work in a scientific sense. They’re not going to tell us anytime soon, just like Coca-Cola isn’t going to be tweeting their famous recipe any time soon. You have a whole industry based on theory, and rarely is it scientific enough to pass any muster. Buzzwords and phrases thrive in such areas. So let’s break down some fallacies.

1. Content is king: Flat out wrong. The conversion is king. How you define conversion is your own choice, such as a sale, a newsletter sign up, or a lead. What ever it is, if you have millions of visitors, and the site hasn’t generated anything for you but server load, you can talk about content all day and it won’t matter. The fact is that your website has a goal, perhaps monetary or just collecting data. Content is a part of getting conversions, and helps bring that data in, but if you have a store full of browsers and no buyers, you really can’t show that to an investor.  New buzz phrase that won’t catch on, but should: Content is a high ranking military strategist.
2. It’s all about links: Frustrating. This is like having 1,000 acquaintances and no real friends. For every link that you make a visitor/customer jump through you have a loss of about 9%. Considering all your customer has to do is literally lift a finger, that’s quite alarming.
   Yes, link building is important. Content more so, but if you have a background in marketing, you probably know how to make content compelling, and conversion friendly already. In a world of exponential social media growth, why link to your twitter account when you can integrate live streams getting the content AND the link search engine credit? Why link, when you can INTEGRATE?
   New buzz phrase that won’t catch on, but should: Linking is the poor man’s integrating.
3. We don’t have time for Social Media. Oh really? I suppose you don’t have a customer service phone either then. Customer service doesn’t generate much revenue, it prevents lost revenue. Business has made it so hard to get something fixed in the name of cost cutting that The Oatmeal sums it up best. If I have a product that doesn’t work as it is supposed to, I have a 50% chance that I will ebay it, just so I don’t have to deal with a non-tech savvy dotard reading from a HTML wizard.
   Social media, when used socially and not a one way sales push pipe, can transform your target audience’s perception of you. Imagine actually being able to create a quick custom check list of things to check for on their own time for each person because you have a record of their issue and statements. Who would call then?
   I know what you’re thinking. Ben we don’t have the resources for that. If I learned anything as a teenager, it was that I can have 5 simultaneous conversations online as opposed to 1 on the phone. By that measure, for every 5 of your phone reps I need one social rep. Sounds like a money saver down the road considering more than half the world population is under 30. Plus it is SEO friendly provided the link shorteners are 301 redirects.
   New buzz phrase that won’t catch on, but should: Social is the new survey/customer service hybrid.

Yes these are all parts of the search engine system, but take a step back and realise that it is a dance. You can’t dance with one leg, and you can’t get to the top of the page rank with just links. Spending too much time on SEO and not on being better for your customer is only the marginal gain you could have from actually just being better than your competitor.

So, what other buzzwords and theories need a bazooka reality check?

http://ow.ly/16vg4

Image from suicidemachine.org

The mass defriending, purging or cleansing of your Twitter followers, or Facebook and MySpace friends, and LinkedIn Connections is what I’m talking about. Like a nuclear option, or as some hippies say, ‘Getting off the grid’.

A new site dubbed The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, has made that process a little more expedient.

I did it once, to my MySpace account. Not because my reputation was sullied, but because I got sick of MySpace’s notoriously long load time. But it felt great anyway.

It was inevitable. Anything that booms, has adjustments and detractors. My former boss told me of stories of secretaries that refused to switch from typewriters to computers. Way to be on the wrong side of history! But you can’t blame them with the online dis-inhibition effect and the ruining of reputations online.

Is it anything to worry about? Not really. Social media and social media suicide campaigns aren’t in direct competition. Like a candidate in an election that boycotts his own race, he/she will  not win, but merely make a statement about the election itself.

Don’t tell the Iranian government, but dissent is an important bumper on the rails of ambition. It is never glamorous or popular, but it serves a purpose.  See the following:

“Even when dissenters don’t have enough votes to to change The Court’s (referring to the US Supreme Court) opinion, they still affect the process.” – Ori Brafman form Sway: The Irresistible  Pull of Irrational Behavior

“It makes the other person take account of the point. They have to answer it or they have to take it into account” - Justice Stephen Breyer, US Supreme Court

These guard rails of logic are helpful, but dubbing it suicide might be a bit much. It is possible to be a “Negative Nancy”. I remember a student that would almost ubiquitously start any response with “It’ll never work…” What kind of help does that bring to the table? Well depending on what follows. Answer it, or account for it I say.

And much like a repressive regime, unfortunately Facebook has threatened legal action against the The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. Especially since the young CEO of Facebook just said that privacy online is not to be expected anymore as a ‘social norm’, you would think he could take a lesson in timing.

Maybe the solution for Facebook is to take a look at Google and apply the motto “Don’t Be Evil” a little more generously.

Go on, let them ‘commit 2.0 suicide’. Why not? They won’t be tweeting, posting or updating about it now will they?

Also see: Social Media Backlash?