Every company wants to create a “fair reputation” for generating publicity over the Web. But to stand ahead of competition amongst a plethora of websites and to create quick publicity for pushing up sales, companies have indulged themselves into a multitude of malpractices which in technical terms of SEO language you may say, black hat tactics. It is an aggressive and risky technique adopted by many Online Reputation Management Service Provider for increasing a site or page’s rank in search engine by violating the terms and conditions of search engines. The result will lead to a ban on such websites if a service provider is found to be involved in such practices. If you find your ORM service provider considering using any of the following techniques, prefer not to consider their services that go out of its way for building up publicity:
- 'Astroturfing': In this practice, fake accounts are created by companies on review websites and use it for writing positive reviews, or it will pay users to do so for giving a boost up to the ratings and detract from other negative reviews.
- Creating fake websites or content: This tactic is used for covering up any negative results by launching fake websites and blogs to create more search results when people may search for you or your business.
- Keyword stuffing: In order to increase your rankings in search engines, this tactic is used to pack as many keywords as possible into your website's metadata.
- Link Spamming: This tactic is used to create as many links as possible to positive content for the search engines to rank that positive content repeatedly in high numbers.
- Invisible text: This tactic is used as identical to keyword stuffing, where extra keywords are placed on your website. In this context, they’re written on the page itself but are hidden by making the text in the same color as of the page’s background.
- Using spam bots: Spam boat tactic is used by some of the reputation management companies where denial-of-service attacks and hacking methods are used to target negative content and making it difficult or impossible to access it by other users.