Online Reputation Management: An ActiveRain Case Study

Michael - great advice - it's very easy to overoptimize posts/web pages and important to play by Google's rules. That reblog helps you as it is spreading your content and backlinks across the web. Thanks, Dave

Thank you for the great education.  I learned so much from your post.

Thanks for the tips and kick in the pants to get it right.  SUGGESTED.

Michael, thank you for the education!  I'm learning so much about SEO here in the Rain!  Google has so much leverage in the online world that understanding how to have Google juice is a must.

Michael I want to say first that I respect your knowledge on SEO but I am going to respectfully disagree with you on this one. When I google the term you come up #1. Often times what can happen with posts coming from Active Rain if the rebloggers post gets indexed first. Google typically fixes that within a day and the original author gets credit and the position changes. If you are signed into google or have not cleared your cache you are also going to get different results based on the sites you have visited as well.

Ok I just did it again by also going "private" You are correct she is #1 however you are #2. If you look at the result you will see that her page was cache 2 hours prior to you. I would be willing to bet at some point you move to #1:) It would be silly to think that Google would not want to put the author in the 1st position.

Well get on the ball there Michael! I just added you so we can help each other out. Yes, I have seen reblogs higher because of that very reason! Interesting!

I definitely need to add more people to my circles.. I have not been doing that as much as I should and reblogging more often too.

Hey Michael check again now - I see you in the #1 position going private on a proxy server. If you look at the cache you will see Google has come back and visited since the original posting. The re-blog is now in the #2 position. This is how it should work regardless of how many more people Debbie has in her circles.

I know you didn't care if she came before you on this particular post but just imagine for a second if you were a realtor and wrote an incredible post about short sales. Would you want someone else to be able to copy your article and come before you in the search results because they had more followers on Google, Twitter or some other social platform?

I think you can understand this would create havoc on the SERPS and would not be what Google intended. You would have a lot of pissed off people if they were the author and someone else showed up first for their article. This would not only increase plagarism by an excessive amount but everyone and their brother would be "gaming" getting Google friends.

Is it possible that it could be a small factor in Googles algorithm - I am quite sure it is but there are over 200 factors in SEO for serp placement. If someone had a 100,000 more friends than me on Google plus it shouldn't EVER put them above me in a post I WROTE.

A little overwhelmed here. I don't even know how to attach my active rain account with my google plus account, but until a couple months ago I had  twenty something assistant who did it all...whew! Where to start?

Michael, Awesome Stuff right here.  I G+'d it, LinkedIn'd it and FaceBook'd it.  I am expecting my "geeks" will want to discuss this at length.  Thank You for Sharing the Info and your Insight and giving us some coffee chatter today.

Circle around Rainers - here's my circle.  

Michael, Looks like Google is looking for good content from writers not trying to game the Google system.

OMG, this is hilarious!!!  I'm so sorry...I think.  I love your stuff, so I reblog it.  For what it's worth, when I do the search, you actually come up first on my list, not me...so this may be user specific.

I'm not using G+ nearly as much as I should, but thanks to you, I'm trying to make it more of my routine.  So, now I'm trying to G+ one of my AR articles per day as an update (I've alway +'d my WP articles but there are fewer of them).

And, thx for the answers.com tip.  I started doing that this week.  I answered a few, and then a couple of days later a few more and today 2 more.  My trust ranking went from 0 to 2 already.  I'm going to try to do this once per week (every weekend when I'm doing WP commenting w/ back links - I try to do 6 per weekend - 2 for each of my 3 sites).  Oh, and you know what else is great abt thsi??? It's giving me ideas for future blog topics.  I can see the flooring questions and I think it's ranking them based on popularity of the questions.  So lots of blog fodder now.

I'm now just reading all the comments. I've also experienced this where an agent reblogged my post and they came up higher on search than I did.  Anecdotally, this seemed to happen more when I first started and the agent came up higher if they were using AR more (and prob. their page rank was higher, if I recall correctly).  But, it's still good as I came up on the searches and they gave me a link back to my AR blog, which in turn helped my overall page rank.  I think it happens less often now as my AR blog has PR3 (but my profile still only has PR2).

Also, I noticed on AR that one of "my" more popular flooring blogs, was a reblog of a fellow Floor Coverings International franchisee.  I retitled it...and titled it better and I got way more hits on it - some of the hits are for the topic and others for the geography.  He stopped using AR, so that may be another reason.  A year later, he gave me his password so I could make some quick edits on his acct.  I was expecting him to have a huge # of hits on the original blog post, but he didn't....they all seemed to be going to me.  I was stunned.  I then tried to do a similar but improved post on the same topic, but it didn't seem to garner the same hits as I think the hits are going to that original reblog.

Bizarre.  But, I guess it does show the importance of trust and the synergistic effect you can have by writing a lot and in multiple places.

Okay, just learned something and got more confused at the same time.  I set up a Google + account a couple of days ago and I'm trying to figure it out. I created a page too but now I'm not sure how to use them.  You've just convinced me of how important that account is.  Now I must spend some time getting educated on it. 

Thank you,  I've said it before but its worth repeating,  I can't believe HOW MUCH I LEARN on AR.

Kathy

Hi Michael - just to see if my theory on this was correct I am back to let you know that your article is in the #1 position and you will not find the re-blog anywhere on the first page. This is how it should be and if it worked any other way the web would have real problems:)