Reputation Management Online

Recently we have been contacted by companies being hit hard by Google Query Suggestions. If you are not sure what these are, when you start typing words into Google, it will come back with suggestions as you type. See example below:

So sounds harmless enough?  I am sure it was intended to be,  if you check out Google’s Query Suggestion page

Why it’s helpful

• Rest your fingers.
  Need to do a big search on a tiny keyboard? Suggestions come in real-time, so typing [ great w ] and clicking ‘great wall of china’ is faster and easier than typing it out.
• Catch a mistake.
  Did you mean: Melbourne Australia? Start searching for [ melborn ], say, and Google Suggest will offer more common spellings for what you might be trying to find.
• Skip a page; save some time.
  If Google detects that a specific site is relevant to the search you’re typing, we’ll provide a link straight to it, so you don’t have to wait for the search results page. If a link is to a site in our adversiter network, it’ll appear in a colored box labeled ‘Sponsored Link.’
• Repeat a favourite search.
  If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, we may show some suggestions based on searches you’ve done in the past. You can tell a suggestion is from your history if it has a Remove link next to it.

Splitting the atom, scientists at first looked at this as a way to generate power efficiently, of course it didn’t take long for some people to look at how they can use it for weapons of mass destruction.   Guess what?  Some people are now looking at query suggestions as a weapon of mass destruction to a company’s reputation.

So how can this very innocent feature that google introduced become a company killer?  The search query is set off when when people start searching for specific keyword terms, so for example people searching for Olympics will start adding specific years.  Google picks up on this and starts to offer it as suggestions.

If you have a large number of customers and some of them have had a bad experience, then they may start looking for a way to complain and start searching terms like “Your Company Name + Complaints”, enough people start doing it and it can soon become a Google suggested query.   Even worse is someone could add a few negative comments about your company in a forum and before you know it not only is Google now making negative suggestions but also the negative forums are now showing up for your company name or brand quite often above your own site.  Look what happened to Tiger Woods in a very short time.

So it won’t take long for unscrupulous competitors to catching on to this and start seeding such search quires.   Once it takes hold it will be very difficult and costly to fix in both time and effort.

Another issues that can cause you problems is your business model, if you ask for money upfront people are incredibly suspicious.  We have had several companies approach us about this exact problem, a potential customer will type search terms like “Company Name + Scam” or “Company Name + Hoax” again it does not take many of the same searches to trigger Google’s suggested query and now you have a massive online reputation problem.  Follow this up with a few negative comments in a forum or a site like scam.com and it could cost you your business.

Make sure you are on top of you customer complaints procedure before issues get out of hand.  If you product is not up to scratch don’t be surprised if it does not take long for Google to pick up on this.  We have managed to help companies reputation online by introducing certain procedures to reduce and water down the impact once negative suggested queries started to effect their business.

Taking a proactive approach will help defend your company name, brands and reputation online, make sure you listen to customers and remember to show that you have.  A journalist cannot follow a story if you have shown you heard the problems and are addressing them.  If you bury your head in the sand then it will be a very costly exercise.