Matthew Botos

Last week I received an unusual offer: $500 to remove a blog entry that a company didn’t like customers seeing in search results for their name.

It gave me a brief pause, but was a pretty quick decision: I simply felt it was unethical to take payment in exchange for my right to free speech. One of the nice things about this being my personal blog is that only that argument mattered, with no trade-off against management, advertiser, or investor considerations. If I have one goal here, it’s to share information of interest to the audience, however small it might be.

That does beg a tangential question: how does my humble blog become powerful enough to rattle an established company into a buyout offer? It turns out my natural search engine optimization is pretty good; the entry made the first page on Google for this company’s name, and was the first actual customer review.

More interestingly, it was the #1 search result for “company sucks” - surprising since I never used that phrase and the review itself was neutral and factual. Instead, Google had picked up on a related link inserted by WordPress that “sucked”.

The experience proved two statements I’ve made in the past: search engine optimization is a powerful tool, and you have to monitor and manage your online reputation.