Matt Cutts is getting the ball rolling on the don't vote blog meme to help promote Google's new voter registration effort, so you just have to tag five friends to get them to register and they gotta tell five more friends, so here it goes

 

My Tags:

Dave Snyder - Cause Angry Voters Are Good Voters :)

Andy Beal - Cause I know he has been monitoring the candidates reputations and knows all the dirt

Marty Weintraub - Cause he's crazy enough to do the right thing no matter what :)

Brian Carter - Cause a little laughter goes along way

Utah SEO Pro - Cause NoFX would want me to make sure he was registered!

So go register, get the facts and get your ass out there and vote! And make sure your friends are registered and voting, it's not important how you vote - just that you do. If you don't participate then we all loose!

So I was over reading Michael Jensen's blog SoloSEO about how Google was going to roll out Google suggest into the main engine, removing it from the Google Labs. Both Patrick Altoft and he were of the position that this would effectively kill the long tail. As Google will now be forcing users into high-volume, high-money terms (i.e., terms that people are bidding on via Adsense) it's almost like Google is creating a new Top 10 before the user is ever even taken to the SERPs. By having your primary keywords that you are ranking for listed in this drop down, you are far more likely to get traffic than those related terms that aren't being listed. When presented with options, people will generally choose one. That's not to say they will be satisfied with that result and only stay in those SERPs but I am willing to bet it's going to be the first stop for them. I am sure we could talk endlessly about how relevant these phrases are that Google is going to be offering searchers. Will users be forced to immediately perform another search to get the results that they actually want? Perhaps. But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about how Google Suggest is going to lead to an Online Reputation Management nightmare for many.

 

As you see by the illustration above, for my name Google only suggests three items--one of them being the infamous zima meme that my wonderful friend Andy Beal started. So with my particular name it doesn't really matter. Instead, let's take a look at Barack Obama.

 

As you can see, there are two glaring negative results. One is the "obama antichrist" listing and the other is "obama muslim." Both of these results, however, are not among the top 10 results for the keyword "obama" because of savvy--and quite effective--online reputation management.

Indeed, Barack has done a very effective job on properly managing his online reputation. His efforts with Fight the Smears has been a transparent and up-front way to deal with untruths about himself and his campaign. However, now that Google Suggest is presenting users with these options, some users will be inclined to begin looking around in these SERPs. Even though Barack has done a wonderful job managing his online reputation, negative or false stories are now immediately brought to the front of the results for his name. So how do you manage this now? Over the next few weeks, I will start to take a look at what might be powering Google Suggest and how that can impact you and your online reputation management issues.

 

Just one last parting gift a look at suggested results for John Edwards. Again, we see a reputation management nightmare.

 

P.S. I can't believe I actually said Zima on my blog, I am so afraid of what I am going to start ranking for now :)

Update #1:

MikeTek, down in the comments & over on twitter, had pointed out another great reputation nightmare that has occurred because of Google Suggest. It's none other than SEOChampion, and a search for his name michael rotkin displays michael rotkin is a turd. This shouldn't surprise anyone as SEOChampion pissed off lots and lots of people, over at SES San Jose read up over at Dave Snyder's SnydeySense.

 

So the whole world waited with baited breath yesterday to get that text message from Obama about who his VP was. And the concept was great I thought, because of the way that social media has changed the news cycle. You see more and more news being broken via social media and it's then mainstream media who is making the commentary. Well Obama wanted to provide his supporters with that same kind of power, break it to the few first, before any official press release or any press conference or before any mainstream news source scooped it. Well after he didn't get me the text message yesterday, I kind of stopped caring. And that's the problem, because it had such a build up - because he had everyone anticipating the announcement yesterday when he couldn't deliver it was a huge let down to many. Now not to say this cost him voters or anything like that, I am just saying it's one of the problems with politicans trying to leverage social media & other technological innovations to reach their supporters. A decision like picking your VP is a very important one and takes lots of time and thought. But us social media types aren't very patient, if we don't get the information when we want it or when we thought that we were going to have it, we quickly move on. I think Obama has executed a brilliant social media and internet campaign, probably the best ever; but this time he let us down. Not to mention as Andrew Shotland pointed out this morning Google already knew

Andrew Shotland over at Local SEO Guide had a great posted the other day about his analysis of backlinks to presidential candidate’s websites and remarkably the google algorithm correctly predicted the Democratic Winner; but was wrong on the Republican side according it to his analysis Ron Paul should have won hands down with more than 3 times as many links as Mike Huckabee. As we all saw though that wasn't the case. But anyone who has been following Ron Paul or his rise to internet fame knows that Digg users absolutely love Ron Paul they eat up everything that Ron Paul related.  So of course he is going to have more links than anyone else.

So does this mean Google's idea of one link equals one vote is broken? Or is the Ron Paul phenomenon more akin to spam and therefore not as relevant? Because as we saw the number two Republican Mike Huckabee did indeed win. So maybe in Andrew's analysis he should have penalized Dr. Paul just like Matt Cutts would penalize a filthy spammer. Lets face it, Digg users basically spam consistently and blindly promote Ron Paul stories all of which of course point back to Dr. Paul's site. And as we all know it's a very limited number of Digg power users that really control the content of the Digg front page. And once it goes hot on Digg of course more and more people link to the story in hopes to get a little residual traffic from talking about the hot item. Voting up and talking about that item becomes the "in" thing to do. So it then becomes unfair to count each one of those links as a vote, because in essence they are manufactured links - in reality nothing more than a link farm.

So am I trying to same Google's algorithm is broken? No I am actually saying the opposite, that Google's algorithm is fairly on target as it goes with deciding what content is popular and relative. But it also shows a fundamental flaw in the Google algorithm, that people can give links and people can get people to get links and powerful people can reach more and more people garnering more and more links. So good news is that Google gaming will continue on as long as links are part of the equation.  Even without links I am sure some portion of the Google algorithm will have some gameable component.