reputation management Archives - Page 4 of 7

Ask the Experts: Are These Consumer Rating Tools Helpful…

October 29, 2012
by Gradiva Couzin

Q. I own a small business with a local shop plus an online store, and I’ve been told I need more customer reviews for my shop. I’ve heard there are tools that will get the shop reviewed online. What are these tools and do they actually work?

A. Customer reviews of your business, such as seller ratings on Google or brick-and-mortar reviews on Yelp, are a growing priority for small businesses, as well they should be. Despite the importance of online reviews, soliciting customers for reviews on a regular basis can be a challenge. A “mom and pop” owner who is already overburdened with running his or her shop may find it difficult to get out there and chat up happy customers to encourage positive reviews.

Below, we’ve listed four tools designed to help businesses gather reviews. These tools are geared toward online purchases. They allow the business owner to set up post-transaction customer outreach seeking reviews. The customer reviews are posted on the tools’ own website, not on the business’s site. These tools won’t help with Yelp listings or other popular review sites with which you may be familiar.

Customer Lobby will contact customers for reviews on your behalf by phone and email. The reviews are posted on a third-party independent website that can be found in Google search results. Customers with Google+ or Yahoo profiles are also directed to post reviews there.

Shopper Approved asks customers for reviews on an online thank-you page after a purchase is complete. Each review is posted on an optimized web page that can be found in search results. The more ratings and reviews your business receives, the more pages are created. A 30-day free trial is available.

Demand Force solicits customer reviews from an automated ‘thank you’ message sent immediately after a visit to the business. The company offers a syndication service in which the data is sent to Google, so a client’s Google Plus page is kept up-to-date with new content. A free demo is available.

ResellerRatings offers a customer follow-up platform to gain reviews for your business. In addition to your business’s reviews being listed on their site, ResellerRatings has the distinction among the services listed that the reviews feed into Google’s seller ratings list for your business. These seller ratings display alongside your business in Google Shopping listings and can result in gaining stars on your Google AdWords listings.

Do these tools work? We’d have to say “Yes,” but they come at a cost. ResellerRatings in particular drew a great deal of ire when it cranked up its prices dramatically over the past year or so, given that it was one of the few third-party rating sites that feeds into Google. All of the capabilities of these tools could probably be reproduced by a do-it-yourselfer at a lower cost, with a bit of time and technical know-how. However, if you have more money than time available, these tools could be a good choice for you.

ask the experts

Ask the Experts: How can I keep private materials…

April 18, 2012
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: We have some private materials on our site, but we’re not able to use robots.txt or a robots meta tag to disallow the pages from indexing. As long as we don’t link to the pages, and only send them out as links in emails, will Google have any way of indexing these pages?

A: As we’ve said many times, the only way to keep materials truly private online is to password-protect them. Even if you don’t link to your pages, here are a few ways that your private URLs might find their way into Google’s index:

People have reported seeing links from within Gmail messages spidered by Google, although this isn’t something that we have experimented with first-hand. We do know that Google spiders Gmail content emails and uses “content extraction” in order to match advertisements, but there is no documentation of other uses of the spidered content.
Private URLs can be seen by Google in other odd ways. For example, if somebody clicks from your private page to another website, then your private URL would show up as a referrer in the server logs. Some server logs are public, or find their way into the public realm, and that could expose the private URL.
If someone visits the private URL while having the Google toolbar activated, then the URL could get collected and find its way into Google’s index.
If the link is included in a listserv email (seemingly private), then that could be scraped and republished on the web.
One of your authorized visitors could post a link within a forum post, on Facebook or Twitter, or somewhere else that he/she believes is private or semi-private, and that link could eventually be followed and indexed.

As you can see there are a lot of possible sources for leaks!

The best safeguard would be to password protect the individual pages, and your second-best approach is to deindex using the robots meta tag. Without password protection, robots.txt or meta robots to prevent indexing, your next best line of defense is to watch for indexing and then do one of two things:

remove any files that have been indexed and put them in a different URL; or
place all of the private content in the same folder on your server, and then use Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools to remove the files or folder from the indexes if/when it gets indexed.

These should give minimize your exposure in Google, but if your materials are truly confidential, you need password protection. And without a doubt, ixnay on the social security umbers-nay!

Ask the Experts: Are These Consumer Rating Tools Helpful…

Q. I own a small business with a local shop plus an online store, and I’ve been told I need more customer reviews for my shop. I’ve heard there are tools that will get the shop reviewed online. What are these tools and do they actually work?

Ask the Experts: How can I keep private materials…

Q: We have some private materials on our site, but we’re not able to use robots.txt or a robots meta tag to disallow the pages from indexing. As long as we don’t link to the pages, and only send them out as links in emails, will Google have any way of indexing these pages?

Get An Effective SEO Strategy