Picture this: you’ve posted a blog on your site as part of your search engine optimisation campaign. It’s a huge success, and your business is getting some great press because of it. Part of the reason for the blog’s success is because of the interesting and insightful comments three or four users keep posting. These three or four are the heart of your blog’s community, and it’s mainly due to this that your blog is so respected.
Then it’s revealed that those comments all come from your company, and you’ve been controlling the situation all along.
Not a great scenario, is it? This kind of blog disaster has happened to hundreds of businesses worldwide, and it can absolutely kill a blog’s popularity. The blogging community can be a source of great support, but also great censure when bloggers step over the line. Faking popularity in this way is particularly frowned upon.
Businesses make mistakes. They might be small, or they might be monstrous, but it happens in all levels of business. Usually, these mistakes are less-than-visible to the general public. When they happen on the net, however, they’re not just visible, but their importance can get amplified.
It’s hard to cover up mistakes on the net. The internet is one, big, digital paper trail. It can take years at times for the attention to drift from a particularly scandalous mistake, and there’s usually a danger that the mistake can come back to haunt you at any time. Unless you manage to arrange for related pages to fall off the net, it will never be completely forgotten.
A blogging disaster can have an incredible impact on your SEO campaign. If your blog is at the heart of your site’s search engine optimisation plan, a scandal surrounding that blog can mean that every time a blog page is searched for, negative associations will come up alongside it. This is more of a reputation management issue than an SEO issue, as the extra traffic from the scandal will ultimately do your site’s ranking some good. You can, however, use SEO to overcome your reputation hassles by gaining control of the other spots for your keywords and pushing the negative press off the top ten. Talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about using SEO for reputation management.
The best way to avoid this kind of blogging disaster is to not have it happen in the first place. Often, companies make mistakes with their blogs because they try to manoeuvre their market in an underhanded way. Being open about your motives is usually a good idea, even if you’re afraid of losing your audience.
When this kind of disaster happens, it takes time to recover from. The way to recover is to go back to what you should have been doing in the first place, being open and honest. Many business blogs have managed to recover from the scenario described above by making an open apology and moving forward with honest posts. Resolving the problem this way can also neutralise negativity in the future.
