One of my SEO clients is a financial services company. Recently scammers have started targeting people, pretending to be from the company and cold calling people and taking payments. Bottom line is this is starting to affect their reputation. The client now wants to rank for negative keywords such as company name scam and company name fraud and put up a page warning customers and potential customers but I am in two minds about doing this. Any suggestions on this.
scammers targeting SEO client
- Thread starter MrGrumpy
- Start date
meatro
BANNED
- Nov 21, 2009
- 568
- 1,001
You shouldn't have mixed feelings about this, it's actually a very good idea of your client, a standard practice in reputation management and you should be happy they're willing to do this. It's a very good thing that they're WANTING to protect their users from fraud.
I've had to fix some online reputations and let me tell you, it's much easier when the client is willing to rank a page of their site to contain the word "scam" or "fraud." Of course this page should be exactly what they're talking about, a warning to potential victims that somebody IS actively targeting them and the appropriate actions to ensure they receive authentic products/services. (If you have any specifics on the scammers that can actually bring some action against them, tell your users... EG, kicking them off their affiliate network, reporting to their money transfer co., etc.)
Also, it's best that you have this head start because the day you find RipOffReport and ComplaintsBoard on page 1 is not the ideal time to start your campaign. Once somebody submits one of those, it WILL be on page 1 in a matter of minutes if you do not have the existing framework in place to outrank it before it even gets a chance.
1. Make a page on the site dedicated to warning users about potential fraud. Outline the necessary steps for them to avoid this.
2. Work the words fraud, complaints, scam, etc into other areas of your site. "We work hard to prevent fraud." - "Clients should always be aware of potential scams." - "Please be sure to contact us in the event of any questions or complaints." Good places for this are the privacy policy, about us, contact us, those types of pages... Keep it away from your actual content, you don't want those words crossing their minds in the shopping cart.
3. Create profiles around the internet... company.wordpress.com, company.blogspot.com, company.tumblr.com, etc. Do the same thing on all of these, they're not on your site, so you can be a bit more liberal with the words fraud, scam, etc. Just go on about how hard you guys work to protect people from this.
4. Run some cheap SEO campaigns on these pages.. Set up some little SENuke X schedules, comments, etc... These are LOW COMPETITION, long tail keywords.
(Not many people trying to rank for your company name, I hope.)
But it's a very, very good thing for their rep that they're willing to actually confront the issue head on themselves, on their page. Like I said, most people have strong feelings against doing it on their site and usually just want to flood the SERPs with their own content (which is all rep management is. Flood the SERPs with pages that YOU control the content on.)
I've had to fix some online reputations and let me tell you, it's much easier when the client is willing to rank a page of their site to contain the word "scam" or "fraud." Of course this page should be exactly what they're talking about, a warning to potential victims that somebody IS actively targeting them and the appropriate actions to ensure they receive authentic products/services. (If you have any specifics on the scammers that can actually bring some action against them, tell your users... EG, kicking them off their affiliate network, reporting to their money transfer co., etc.)
Also, it's best that you have this head start because the day you find RipOffReport and ComplaintsBoard on page 1 is not the ideal time to start your campaign. Once somebody submits one of those, it WILL be on page 1 in a matter of minutes if you do not have the existing framework in place to outrank it before it even gets a chance.
1. Make a page on the site dedicated to warning users about potential fraud. Outline the necessary steps for them to avoid this.
2. Work the words fraud, complaints, scam, etc into other areas of your site. "We work hard to prevent fraud." - "Clients should always be aware of potential scams." - "Please be sure to contact us in the event of any questions or complaints." Good places for this are the privacy policy, about us, contact us, those types of pages... Keep it away from your actual content, you don't want those words crossing their minds in the shopping cart.
3. Create profiles around the internet... company.wordpress.com, company.blogspot.com, company.tumblr.com, etc. Do the same thing on all of these, they're not on your site, so you can be a bit more liberal with the words fraud, scam, etc. Just go on about how hard you guys work to protect people from this.
4. Run some cheap SEO campaigns on these pages.. Set up some little SENuke X schedules, comments, etc... These are LOW COMPETITION, long tail keywords.
(Not many people trying to rank for your company name, I hope.)
But it's a very, very good thing for their rep that they're willing to actually confront the issue head on themselves, on their page. Like I said, most people have strong feelings against doing it on their site and usually just want to flood the SERPs with their own content (which is all rep management is. Flood the SERPs with pages that YOU control the content on.)
