Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

Online reputation management is more than having a website about what you do. Potential employers, business partners, investors, or even the girl you meet at the bar can learn everything about you with a simple Google search.

Anyone can write anything about you on the Internet, so its important to know what is being said and how you can enter the discussion in a tactful way that furthers your goals. The online information about you or your company paints a public portrait of who you are and what you represent.

Here are some examples of situations my clients have experienced in the past, mistakes they made, and what you can do if you find yourself in similar situations. Have you ever had to deal with any of these common online reputation missteps:

As I explained in yesterday’s post, Akismet banned me from posting comments on WordPress blogs because of my use of a trackback spam tool I tested out a few months ago.

After some searching, I found one other blogger who suggested simply contacting Akismet if you feel you were wrongly blacklisted.

While I definitely deserved some punishment for trying to exploit the trackback system, I had been “clean” form spam-like activities for a long time and had been working diligently for months to restore my blog’s honor in the eyes of Akismet.

Could a simple email be the answer I had been looking for?

In fact, it was. I used the contact form on the Akismet website to submit a “I have a support or feature request” service ticket. I was completely honest in my email where I explained what happend and asked for the penalty to be lifted.

A few months back I started experimenting with Jeremy Schoemaker’s Shoemoney Tools suite. In particular I tested out the Related Blog Post tool. While the other tools in the set are invaluable, this one caused me some serious grief because I failed to fully understand what the tool did.

As a result of my lack of understanding, Akisment banned me from the WordPress comment system. Anytime I attempted to leave a comment on another blog, it automatically went to their spam folder. It even treated my own trackbacks to other posts on this blog as spam in my own spam folder!

It should be pointed out that the tool does come with a warning that reads “Be careful with this one,” but I did not heed the warning.

I was taking a lazy Sunday looking over my Google Analytics data from 2008 to see what kind of posts brought the most organic search traffic.

I dropped the calendar back to January ’08 and did a traffic source search. I was surprised to see what turned up. Here is a list of the top 6 most frequently visited pages on this blog through organic search in 2008:

The most basic explanation is that Google sees hyphens as spaces, and interprets them in the same way a space is used to separate two words.

One of the best explanations about how this works was written on Guru of Search where he posts that Google considers hyphens to be spaces in a domain name. If you start thinking of hyphens as spaces separating keywords as well, you can begin to select domain names that will have a slight edge in the search engine results positions (SERPs) over some of your competitors.

The first post was targeted toward things that I accomplished as part of Schrock Innovations. This post will be more focused toward personal and internet marketing accomplishments.

To all of the nose-raised snobs on who churn out 140 keystroke diatribes on maintaining the purity of Twitter I say – No one really cares what you are doing.

Motive Interactive is launching a new advertising network called The Motive Network designed to combine a publisher centric advertising network and a direct lead generation network into one synchronized entity

Read this post to learn how you can get a MacBook Air for as little as $25 – NO JOKE! I was browsing around on eBay this morning and saw some scammy looking guy doing what he called a “mystery auction”. The concept was very similar to a blind auction where you bid on an […]

A friend of mine emailed me the other day and asked a very basic question about a term that gets tossed around the affiliate marketing industry pretty loosely.

He asked me what it means to “own” a keyword or phrase. I have to admit that I have used this term here in the past without much thought about how vague it really is.