During the course of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism‘s sting operation, published in the Independent today, Bell Pottinger’s head of public affairs Tim Collins declares: “We’ve got all sorts of dark arts.” These are “dark arts” that apparently can be deployed to manage online reputations for clients.
In other words, by using some rather murky SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques, the company could guarantee more favourable client content appearing higher in Google’s search results.
According to the report:
A presentation shown during the meeting said it [Bell Pottinger] could “create and maintain third-party blogs” — blogs that appeared to be independent. These would contain positive content and popular key words that would rank highly in Google searches. The pair also explained how the firm enables government videos and articles to move to the top of internet searches, while less favourable stories can move down the rankings.
If it is true that Bell Pottinger — which dismissed the Independent‘s coverage as “an attempt to manufacture a story where none exists” — was boasting that it could “manipulate” Google’s search results in this way, then perhaps the firm should reconsider that claim. For a start, it contravenes the codes of conduct of both the CIPR and PRCA — the two main PR industry trade bodies — in terms of transparency.
Moreover, the claim that any PR firm (or anyone) for that matter, can guarantee to manipulate Google results is also clearly bogus.
How does Google decide to rank one page more highly than another? It uses hundreds of different factors to determine its search results but one major signal is the quality of links from other pages. Not only that, but Google knows what constitutes a natural rise in links versus those that someone is attempting to artificially inflate.
Google would notice any abnormal link building, for example a page that suspiciously starts getting lots of links in a very short space of time from what will be, by definition, low authority pages and sites. Creating fake blogs and using comment spam to try and “manipulate” Google (or Googlewashing as some call it) is not tolerated by the search engine firm — and will have the reverse effect.
The Independent‘s report continues:
The firm cited past examples of its work, included manipulating Google rankings for an East African money transfer company called Dahabshiil. Bell Pottinger executives said they had ensured that references to a former Dahabshill employee subsequently detained in Guantanamo Bay because of alleged links to al-Qai’da disappeared from the first 10 pages of a Google search for the company.
OK. It doesn’t take much to work out that the employee concerned was called “Muhammad Sulayman Barre“. Try searching on that name in Google and see what results you get.
Or try searching on “Dahabshiil employee guantanamo“.
The notion that Bell Pottinger could somehow guarantee manipulating Google results is misguided — a definite case of overclaiming for the apparently very expensive “dark arts” of online reputation management.
Andrew Smith is Managing Director of Escherman Limited, a specialist online PR, SEO and analytics consultancy. He tweets @andismit
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