Brand SERPs Foundations Course: Tactics to Avoid and Mistakes Not to Make
Script from the lesson The Brand SERPs Foundations Course
Jason Barnard speaking: The situation you want to improve your brand SERP maybe there’s something in there that doesn’t reflect well on your brand or perhaps you simply want to make your brand SERP sexier.
Jason Barnard speaking: You’re impatient. It’s very tempting to take shortcuts. Very tempting to cheat. So we’re going to look at what not to do this time the errors to avoid and the mistakes not to make.
Jason Barnard speaking: First trying to win the game with Black Hatton spam before I start I’d like to imprint this on your mind. Your brand SERP is a reflection of Google’s opinion of you. There’s a big spotlight on it at all times more than anywhere else in SEO. When you cheat on your brand SERP you’re cheating in full and open view.
Jason Barnard speaking: In many situations cheating spamming black hat and shortcut means taking a calculated risk, which is fine. But in the post-hummingbird world taking a risk with your brand name is not a good idea. Now that Google understands entities as and when you do get caught it’s increasingly difficult to leave that bad mark behind you.
Jason Barnard speaking: Google knows who you are. It doesn’t forget. If you start using cheeky shortcuts, then you’re sending a signal to Google that you are not to be trusted. Google might not see the cheating today, but it will. And when it does your reputation in its eyes will suck. And because it understands entities it understands Who You Are. It won’t forget.
Jason Barnard speaking: Does it hold grudges? I’ve been told by ex Googlers that it didn’t hold grudges for manual penalties in the past. Given how things have moved forwards over the last years and given entity-based search. Even if it doesn’t hold grudges and bad reputation will follow you for the rest of your internet life.
Jason Barnard speaking: The great thing about brand search is that they hit right to the core of Google’s opinion of you. That’s why this course is so important for every brand and every brand’s SEO.
Jason Barnard speaking: If the brand set looks great, then things are going well and the world is all roses. But then the flip side is very dark cheating on your brand SERP is playing with fire on your reputation with Google. Don’t do it. It could well derail your entire SEO strategy.
Jason Barnard speaking: Firstly black hat. Black hat can work in some circumstances but on brand SERPs, it’s really not something to do for many many reasons principally because any black hat actions you take are then attached to your brand directly and your brand is your biggest asset.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number two don’t buy links pbn’s are dangerous as a consultant. I can spot these within minutes literally. In an interview on my podcast Jim Boykin gives some great examples of how he does it. And finally, Gary Ilias has talked about how easy it is for Google to spot these even from a very small seed set.
Jason Barnard speaking: So private blog networks are pretty easy to spot and even in the unlikely case that you fly under the radar with the PBN you’re using today. It will come to the service at some point and that black mark will be held against the entity. That is your brand. You won’t be able to escape it.
Jason Barnard speaking: Don’t buy engagement. This is harder for Google to identify than a PBN but it’s still a dangerous game to play mid to long term. Once again, you’re playing with your brand’s good name. You might get away with it. But what happens if you don’t. You have put your entire SEO strategy on the line.
Jason Barnard speaking: Don’t buy services that sell cheap links whatever the seller tells you. The links are not going to be seen as natural. They won’t bring value on the contrary. They’ll damage your reputation with Google.
Jason Barnard speaking: Cheap links are spammy Links full stop. They’ll be irrelevant. They’ll be links on Forum threads blog comments and directories usually on crappy sites that send no value all they’ll be links from a PBN in either case. It won’t work in the short term and will damage you mid and long term.
Jason Barnard speaking: Risk-free shortcuts don’t exist in brand set Management in short a reliable shortcut quick fix for a brand set simply does not exist. It will catch up with you sooner or later. Maybe five years down the line maybe 10 years down the line, but it will damage your brand because your brand is incredibly directly linked to your brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Here’s an extreme example. Google hit this site with a sitewide penalty because they had bought backlinks five years ago, and they hadn’t cleaned them up
properly.
Jason Barnard speaking: The penalty was so strong and so effective that their homepage didn’t appear for the search on their own exact match brand name. They lost the one search position every single Branch would have top spot for their own brand name.
Jason Barnard speaking: Imagine how damaging that was whether it’s clients respective clients journalists, whoever they could not find the brand when they search for it. You don’t want that to happen to you.
Jason Barnard speaking: So it will blow up in your face today tomorrow three years down the line five years down the line, but it most certainly will explode. I was talking to John Muller and he said people cheat they look for the quick fix. They always will we allow them to cheat initially we leave the gates open and we let people get away with it. Why because that allows us to collect the data to figure out what it is. They’re doing then we close the gates once we forget it out.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now closing the gates could be a smaller simply making the spam irrelevant by excluding that data algorithmically. But it could also mean applying a penalty in the case of cheating on your brand serp that could mean a penalty on your entire brand in Google and that would kill your SEO strategy completely dead. So with all these cheeky shortcut tactics just because something is working today. It doesn’t mean to say it work tomorrow. It probably won’t because Google will gather that data and it will figure it out and they’ll slap you with a penalty.
Jason Barnard speaking: Perhaps a penalty so strong it kills your own homepage on your own brand set.
Jason Barnard speaking: How Google spots the cheating?
Jason Barnard speaking: With all these cheating tactics one thing to bear in mind is patterns. All of them leave a footprint a pattern if there’s one thing a machine can see very easily. It’s a pattern. And if there’s one thing that we as humans cannot make it’s chaos. People who work with will not be able to hide their footprint and the Machine will catch you sooner or later.
Jason Barnard speaking: Once Google has caught you what happens? You might try and shift the blame with penguin and Panda Google made it very clear that you can’t shift the blame website owners who told Google I didn’t know that the company was doing something.
Jason Barnard speaking: Naughty did not have their penalties lifted that argument simply does not wash. And if you’re in Google’s shoes, you wouldn’t accept such a childish, excuse either. Now cleaning up eventually, then you’ll have to clean up. The black hat mess you made and cleaning up black hat is more costly than setting it up. If you’ve ever heard about or been hit by these penalties, maybe Panda may be penguin. You will know what actually getting spam out. There is quite cheap, but cleaning it up isn’t.
Jason Barnard speaking: And there’s a delightfully ironic trap to cleaning up the mess annoyingly the easiest simplest and least expensive way to clean it up is to pay the same company that put the spam out there to remove it all. I’ve seen this happen many many times paying a company to spam and then paying them to clean it all up again.
Jason Barnard speaking: Second trying to drown negative results. Drowning with cheap purpose-built new content. This is the typical Quick Fix offered when a brand serp contains some negative content firstly bear in mind that if a negative article is ranking then Google deems it to be important. You really should look at why Google seems to think it’s important is it because it’s accurate.
Jason Barnard speaking: Beware of any company offering to create cheap content to whether they tell you this or not they doing something that is against Google’s guidelines spam or black cat. And it’s therefore a great candidate for a penalty sooner or later and that penalty falls on you and not on the company. You employ worse still on brand search these tactics very rarely work.
Jason Barnard speaking: These articles very rarely rank page one on your brand set because they bring no value to your audience. Cheap brand Centric content won’t rank. So you’re wasting your money time and potentially ruining your reputation.
Jason Barnard speaking: And creating all these articles that have no use for anybody is creating more spam and that’s one of Google’s big problems. Think about why Google created Panda the reason they brought in panda is because people were creating junk content and the web was filling up with junk.
Jason Barnard speaking: Back in 2011. There was a phenomenal amount of junk content and that posed a problem for Google and for its users. With spammy articles you’re hitting that Panda button again. That’s not a button. You want to be pressing? Panda style penalties are very very radical.
Jason Barnard speaking: Also consider your audience here in the unlikely case that one of these Fami articles does rank then having this type of article on your brand serp damages your
reputation in the eyes of your audience. This type of content usually jumps out as fake to humans. What do they think of you when they see it? If content that looks spammy to a human rights on your brand set does that reflect well on your brand image?
Jason Barnard speaking: So even if you do manage to trick Google for a while ask yourself if you’re doing your reputation in the eyes of your own human audience any good.
Jason Barnard speaking: Almost certainly not. Now negative SEO. Don’t do negative SEO to remove negative results. It’s very difficult to do negative SEO without leaving an identifiable footprint, and it’s very, very risky. Don’t attack the person who’s writing negative things about you because you’ll do it badly, and you’ll probably get caught, either by the person you’re attacking or by Google. It really is playing with fire, and it can easily blow up in your face.
Jason Barnard speaking: If the website owner catches you, they’ll probably react very badly. Since they already rank, they are probably good at SEO. And they’re in a very good position because they’re ranking to make things worse for you. They could simply make the matters more damaging. All work to push the result even further up your set.
Jason Barnard speaking: We have a course that will teach you how to drown negative content effectively and in a manner that retains your good name. It’s all about leapfrogging the bad content with great content that is ranked just below. Another helpful trick is triggering Rich elements such as video boxes and Twitter boxes and killing a Blue Link, thus pushing the bad result down. There’s a whole course about that too.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now moving away from spammy techniques, let’s look at court cases. Calling your lawyers is very tempting, but it’s unlikely to be the effective solution. You need to weigh up the pros and cons. It takes years to get through the courts. It costs a fortune, and it rarely directly changes the situation.
Jason Barnard speaking: Firstly, ask yourself, is the person expressing an opinion? If they are, then they have every right, and the lawyers won’t change that. Free Speech means that you can say what you think of others, and so can they, even if you think they’re wrong or unfair, they have the right to say it. Secondly, are they in the wrong? If yes, then you will theoretically win a court case, but then you need to weigh up how long it will take, how much it will cost, and will you be able to force the site to comply with the judgment? Answers here: It will take years. It will cost a fortune, and you probably won’t be able to apply the judgment.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, a quick note on competitors attacking you by ranking on your brand set. It’s very annoying, but they probably know what they’re doing. They’ve probably balanced the pros and cons, short-term gains outweigh long-term consequences.
Jason Barnard speaking: Perhaps you lose the case in the long term, but then it won’t matter since you have
won the war.
Jason Barnard speaking: Here are the court case scenarios. Number one, the best case is the site owner gets scared and does what you ask. That’s very, very rare. Let’s say 1%. I’ve got no idea if that’s the correct figure, but I’ve never seen any site give up this easily, even when they’re in the wrong. Number two, next best is that you go through the court case and after three years you win. Can you execute the judgment? Perhaps you will get a payment, but can you actually have them remove the content you object to? If the legal entity is under the same jurisdiction as yours, maybe. If not, then you can almost certainly forget it.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number three, they appeal, they extend the process, and you have another few years in court with costs, and you’re back to 1 again. Number four is that you lose and you have spent time and money to go nowhere. In all of these cases, that result has been sitting on your SERP, damaging your business for several years. You’ve spent boatloads of money on lawyers, not to mention your precious time getting the case ready, all for perhaps a 2% chance of actually succeeding. The chances of winning are made particularly slim because one, laws change slowly, and the internet moves fast. So the text of law is years and years behind the current needs, and two, ensure the legal system is absolutely not adapted already to deal with the issues the internet is throwing up. Number two, few lawyers are qualified or capable in this domain. Understanding law and understanding the internet are not mutually
exclusive, but the number of lawyers who truly understand both is very, very limited. So you’re unlikely to even find a lawyer who understands the problem you’re facing.
Jason Barnard speaking: Let alone be able to argue in a court with an illegal system that is not designed for this kind of problem. But they will of course take your case and your money.
Jason Barnard speaking: Number three judges and magistrates understand the internet even less than the lawyers. So the person actually making the decision on this is someone who has no
idea what you’re talking about. And all of that adds up to a bit of a lottery and a slow Lottery at that. Now I don’t say never go to court I say think carefully and if you do choose to take the legal route continue working on your brand soap using the techniques in this course that bad result will probably have disappeared off page one before the court case is over.
Jason Barnard speaking: Next, watch out for firestorms the Streisand Effect. Win or lose a court case you run the risk of triggering the Streisand Effect and it’s pretty scary. It’s named after Barbra Streisand in 2003. She brought a court case to stop a photographer using his photos of her Malibu home. She took him to court with the aim of suppressing the photos. She was in the right and eventually won the case. However, it turns out that the court case had the exact opposite effect of what she was looking for.
Jason Barnard speaking: The court case lasted several months and got wide media coverage. You can guess what happened. During the court case these very boring photos that had interested absolutely nobody went viral on the internet. So by the time the photographer complied with the court ruling and deleted his copies of the photos. The problem was both elsewhere and much much bigger than the initial issue. The photos had been reproduced millions of times by other people and nobody had any control anymore.
Jason Barnard speaking: In short by bringing legal action Barbara’s initial aim of suppressing the photos and making sure that nobody saw them actually triggered the exact opposite. A few
throw away photos that nobody was initially interested in became the talk of the celebrity world, but where she attracted a boatload of negative press about herself around her court case. Here’s the Wikipedia entry that tells us how the name came about and it’s quite a fun story. I’ll let you read that.
Jason Barnard speaking: The Streisand Effect is a good lesson for many shortcut tactics. The more you try to suppress something the more human beings are encouraged to look for it and the more they amplify it and the worse the problem gets. Probably never as bad as this
one for Barbara because now she has a phenomenon named after her. This story is told over and over again 17 years later. This really flipped on her.
Jason Barnard speaking: Now something more positive on legal stuff. The content falls under the European right to be forgotten laws. Then use that instead and ask Google to remove the
result from its results. Just remember that this only covers countries in the EU. So the problem isn’t solved everywhere. Depending on the countries that your market covers that may or may not be a problem.
Jason Barnard speaking: And that leads us neatly onto the fact that we’re playing Google’s game. So we have to play by Google’s rules. The people Googling your brand name are Google’s
users on Google’s website. So Google sets the rules of the game. It’s Google’s game 100% right down the line. If your audience uses Google as far as your brand surf is concerned, you have no choice but to play Google’s games by Google’s rules. You don’t get to pick and choose or even complain.
Jason Barnard speaking: People Googling your brand name are your audience, but they’re also Google’s users and it wants to show those users an honest appraisal of your brand. It doesn’t
make up opinions. It’s reflecting the world’s opinion of you. Google is simply reflecting the world’s opinion of your brand. It ranks the results on your brand SERP by order of value to the person searching your name. So if it’s ranking something that you don’t agree with, perhaps something negative, it thinks it’s relevant and important information that it wants to share with its users. If you want it to show something else, it’s up to you to prove that another piece of content is more valuable, more important, and more relevant. In most cases, your opinion about what content is most valuable, relevant, and important will probably not be quite the same as Google’s. You need to convince. You need to prove that you’re right.
Jason Barnard speaking: Luckily, this series of courses is all about how to play Google’s game by Google’s rules and win that game for your brand set, as long as you avoid the tactics and
mistakes that I set out here. You’ll keep your reputation intact and you’ll be able to master your brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking: Thank you.
