HOW TO RESPOND TO ONLINE DEFAMATION
 |
|
| Article by Mathias Levarek Consultant for MSEO.com |
|
Over the last 10 years, I have been confronted numerous times with customers who were victims of online defamation. In an extreme case, one of our customers had gone from a successful company with 82 employees down to having to file bankruptcy within 1 year due to the severity of the online comments which had been erroneously posted to discredit their website.
In light of my experience, when encountering such situation, my first advice is to never respond to fabricated comments. It only enhances the weight of such comments. No exception.
The best way to respond to defamation is by launching a diligent link-building campaign aiming at drowning the defamatory material.
In the case of http://www.mseo.com, our agency has been the victim of defamation several times by a couple disgruntled ex-employees, as well as dishonest competitors.
In fact, in the FAQs of our link-building section, we published the following:
"...We are not a 'bogus link farm from India' guaranteeing results based on astronomical links forecasts... We apologize in advance to the few legit SEO companies from Mumbai to Bangalore, but the amount of imposters in India diluting the relevancy of our services through irrational promises has led us to use such sarcasm when commenting on this subject..." and also the following:
"...our link-building technicians are spread out mainly between Europe and the MENA region. And, no, we do not hire cheap staff in India nor in China..."
To our surprise, an "army" of agencies from India to China started to post the utmost erroneous comments, aiming at discrediting MSEO.com. Comments ranged from fabricated customers who were reporting how they had been duped by our agency, to fake characters claiming to have been sexually abused (by myself!) while working for us... I had never realized the power of defamation until we had to deal with it in our own business!
We also have had numerous China-based competitors who sent emails blasts/spam campaigns using our identity in an effort to see our site taken down either by the ICANN and/or local bandwidth providers. Regrettably, such actions will result in hundreds of comments from angry recipients referring to our agency as a spammer...
Defamation can take many different faces: fabricated comments on blogs and forums/social networks or email blasts faking a website's identity, but also website cloning can be disastrous.
In a particular case, I dealt with a customer whose website had been cloned, and hosted in Mongolia. The unscrupulous party that had hijacked this website was hoping that, by publishing a double content, Google would penalize our customer's URL. The cloned website had also been used for email blasts/spam campaigns. Of course, our customers took all forms of legal action, and after $35,000 in legal fees (investigators & lawyers), the clone was taken down, only to reappear 5 months down the line, now hosted in Kazakhstan.
Do not expect the ICANN to help you in such case. They will make it your problem between you and the defamatory party. They will ask you to take legal actions and follow the regular judicial system. Only in some extreme cases will they back you up. The problem then becomes even more frustrating since there is no international bandwidth convention. Local bandwidth providers from Mongolia to China will not even care about spam complaints.
Once again, the best thing that you can do is a diligent, ongoing link-building campaign aiming at drowning fabricated comments. Also, try to emphasize your credentials right on your website.
In our case, we publish on a weekly basis over 500 case studies of customers of ours who are currently ranking on the first page of Google on all the 28 languages which we offer. Furthermore, we are the only SEO agency publishing openly our own rankings.
Link-building is the most powerful tool for retaliation.
Regrettably, there is no "miracle recipe" - no cure for the "disease" - no 100% "remedy"... It is a wild world out there on the cyber highway, and you have to be ready for these types of disheartening situations.
Mathias Levarek, Ph.D.
SEO Consultant for http://www.mseo.com
1250 Connecticut Ave NW Suite 200, Washington, DC 20036 USA
Tel: +1 (202) 787-3989 • Fax +1 (202) 318-2453 • E-mail