Over the last several years, influencer marketing has grown into a strong strategy in which brands reach out to their target audience and achieve real business objectives. Through collaboration with influencers, brands are able to create authentic content that resonates with consumers in a way traditional advertising so seldom can. But the success of an […]
Category Archives: Online marketing
5 Reasons to Use Google Analytics
Article Provided Herb Kimble. Google Analytics is the most popular website analytics tool, mainly because it is free and a Google product. In 2005 Google bought out another analytics platform called Urchin, renamed it to Google Analytics and made it free. At that time no one expected this and it was a huge welcome news. […]
Tips to Make Your Small Business Website More Effective
Owning a Web site just isn’t enough for a small business owner to access the benefits offered by an internet presence. Yes, an effective website will bring new leads and sales, strengthen customer relationships, and even reduce wasteful spending (just to name a few of the many benefits) but the key word is effective. What […]
Yelp to Small Businesses: Stop Manipulating Your Reviews!
Article by Pierre Zarokian. Yelp is turning up the heat on businesses it says are manipulating its “natural flow of reviews” on the site. It is vowing vengeance against two groups the company says are abusing its rules: reputation management organizations that promise to fix Yelp reviews, and the businesses that hire them. Not only […]
Ripoff Report Removed from Google for Several Hours, What Happened?
Written by Pierre Zarokian
We stumbled across something quite amazing this morning: RipOffReport appeared to have been completely de-indexed by Google for several hours. We can confirm that at 11 AM pacific standard time, performing a search for “site:ripoffreport.com” or the Ripoff Report brand name returned no results. Although the site has since shown up in Google’s index, it’s interesting that the outage lasted as long as it did.
Another intriguing aspect of this story is that Google was listing a legal request from ChillingEffects.org on its search page. It’s possible that there was some kind of copyright infringement claim made against the company. It’s not immediately clear as to what the nature of that claim could be, but people try to sue the website all the time.
Was Ripoff Report caught doing something Google didn’t like? And if that’s true, what did Ripoff Report do to get back in Google’s good graces? At this point, the answer is unclear. It’s entirely possible that the site was de-indexed as a result of any one of a number of technical errors on the part of the webmaster. How many SEOs routinely deal with a problematic robots.txt file?
Why the website disappeared, and why it has remained de-indexed for couple of hours remains a mystery. I can speak from experience that a problem like this isn’t something a webmaster wants to put off for very long, so it’s likely Ripoff Report was doing everything in its power to get its listings back on Google, which would also explain why the company had no comment on the incident.
This brings back memories of an incident that took place in 2011. Some tech at Ripoff Report accidentally got Ripoffreport.com deindexed from Google using Google webmaster account. Google recognized that this was a potential mistake and reached out to Ripoff Report in order to confirm the problem. It was an important lesson for all of us on delegating ownership to our accounts.
Is this situation similar, or even the same? It’s hard to say at this point. We have no access to legal documents, and the de-indexing only lasted for a few hours. We have every reason to believe the removal was most likely caused by a technical problem with Ripoff Report’s backend.
Veteran Search Marketing Expert Pierre Zarokian to Speak at Pubcon
The world of reputation management is one that isn’t well-defined, and Yelp is one of the primary platforms that businesses are concerned with. Bad Yelp reviews, according to Harvard, have real impact on how consumers perceive a business. Pierre Zarokian, a veteran in the realm of search marketing and the CEO of Submit Express and […]
SUBMIT EXPRESS CEO PIERRE ZAROKIAN DISCUSSES CONTROVERSIAL YELP CASE
Imagine that your business is receiving phone calls from Yelp, unsolicited, trying to sell advertising space. How many times do you have to say “no thank you” until you finally reach the end of your patience? One business wants “no” to mean “no” in every aspect. In a recent interview with Search Engine Journal, Pierre […]
GOOGLE ADDS NEW FEATURE TO ADWORDS SEARCH FUNNELS
Google has added a new feature to its AdWords Search Funnels, a set of reports designed to help users make better decisions about their AdWords keywords, ad groups, and campaigns. By using the new Search Funnels columns, users can now more easily integrate the important data into their everyday optimizations, including their campaign, add group, […]
MAJORITY OF WEBMASTER TOOLS MESSAGES RESPOND TO BLACK HAT TECHNIQUES
In a YouTube video published earlier this month, Google’s Matt Cutts addresses valuable questions regarding the types of messages Google sends out via Webmaster Tools. A user in Tokyo, Japan asked: How many types of messages do you (Webmaster Tools) send now? And, how do you decide what message you send? According to Cutts, Google […]
GOOGLE RELEASES 23RD PANDA UPDATE
On December 21, Google announced another Panda data refresh, affecting nearly 1.3 percent of English queries. The tech giant unveiled the update via Twitter, confirming a change in the algorithm that many in the industry had already noticed. The Panda algorithm is designed to assess website quality, which means low-quality sites get punished with low […]