For over the past few years there have been thousands of business and individuals trying to figure out a way to make ripoffreport.com links about them not rank high on Google and other search engines. Reputation management was and still is the most common solution for having these nasty links rank lower. Reputation management firms like Reputation.com (Reputation Defender) and ReputationArmor.com (Reputation Armor) use social media, profiles, blog posts, domain names, press releases, fresh content and search engine optimization to basically bury (hide) the negative links deeper within search engine result pages.
Up until a few weeks ago there was another way to remove ripoff reports from search engines completely, that is until RipoffReport.com and it’s owner Ed Magedson discovered a glitch in there own website that was allowing extremely internet savvy computer geeks and “black hat” reputation management firms to insert a small string of html code in the name and title fields of the website when creating an account. This code was not visible to ripoff report and the code was a simple “noindex” code that told search engines like Google not to allow the page with this code on it to appear on search engines at all.
Here is an example of the code:
meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”
In order for this code to work you had to make an account at ripoff report and go to your account profile where you manage your name and location. You could simply copy & paste that code behind your display name field. After this, the last step was to make a comment on the ripoff report you wanted to disappear. Within a few days (up to 30), when Google “Re-Crawled” that page, they would see the code telling them not to index it and presto the ripoff report was off the search engine.
Reputation management firms and SEO firms were offering a service that claims to “Remove RipOff Reports” completely from search engines within 30 days or less. Businesses pay thousands of dollars to have these links removed and buried and normally thousands of dollars is warranted because it takes a lot of content, work, and money to actually bury a bad link as strong as RipOff Report. However, the “code injection method” only took a few minutes to implement and was very easy to do. Firms offering this service were making a killing! The service fees were basically 100% profit.
Now all of the people that signed up for this type of service involving the “magic fix” are back in line waiting for anther way to remove the ripoff links about them, thanks to the bug being fixed by Ed Magedson and his team of Consumer Advocate Crusaders.
Not only are all the ripoff reports about people that used the “code injection” back, they are ranking stronger than ever!
Looks like it is back to good old reputation management techniques for firms like Reputation Armor and Reputation.com!
ReputationArmor.com commented to us about the code and said they were unaware of such a code and have never used it, also saying that had they known about it they would have been tempted to use it on behalf off their clients. Reputation Armor says they use good quality content and search engine optimization methods to out rank negative links for clients and such “quick fixes” are in most cases short-term anyway.
A Reputation.com (Reputation Defender) representative from the sales dept. named “KC” or “Casey”, stated he was not aware of such a code and went on to say: “We use a Blunt force approach, where we use positive content, there is no technology to make ripoff reports disappear like that, that I am aware of.”
Although this sales representative was unaware of such tactics, we were unable to reach anyone in the department to answer that question. We called at 9:30 AM EST and that was too early for the West Coast reputation firm to have someone more qualified for us to talk with.
We discover this bug from an email sent to us from a client of a Reputation Firm that used the tactic and is now looking for a similar solution. There seem to be a lot of these firms’ clients looking for answers. In no way are we stating that Reputation Armor or Reputation.com used this code or even knew about it, we cite them because of their strong presence in the Reputation Management industry.
If you have any information on the “Bug” or if you represent RipOff Report we would love to hear more about this. Please leave a comment and tell us the scoop!