Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

However, we’ve all made mistakes. Fortunately for most of us, the general public couldn’t care less what we think do or say, but anyone in the public eye had better get used to the fact that anything, absolutely anything that they’ve done or said that can be traced anywhere, may eventually resurface to cause them embarrassment–or worse–just when they least expect it.

No doubt though, that the accounts of Zuckerberg’s faux pas will pretty soon ‘disappear’ from the engines since he has friends, and is in a position to trade favors to make his bad publicity fade into oblivion.

The rest of us, if we’re unlucky enough to get caught out saying/doing something that reflects badly on us, either personally or in our capacity as a business, need to get really busy online to try and repair the damage.

Take steps to manage your online reputation!

The best way to do this is to flood the Internet (or your little patch of it) with as much positive material as possible. How you saved someone’s life, how you gave away half your worldly belongings in a good cause, how you are putting x-number of orphans through college…the list goes on and you are the best person to come up with ideas on what’s positive and good, that people would be interested to read about.

You can do this through your normal social media channels, and if you have friends who blog they can do a lot to push down those unwanted search results by blogging about you in a positive way, and linking to other positive articles/comments about you on other sites. Facebook itself can be a great help here, as can Twitter and all your Twitter friends.

Being nice to all you meet online and helping others out whenever you can will create good will that will help enormously if you are ever in need of some help with your reputation.

Personally, I think the implications that Google picks and chooses what comes up in a search quite shocking, particularly when those choices distort what ordinary people perceive to be the truth (as in the case of what exactly is going on in Gaza, for example). So i decided to ask around to see what other reactions I could find to this revelation.

The first to respond, and the view which most closely matches my own, was Aaron Wall, who can always be relied upon for in-touch and relevant news and opinion on the field of search and SEO.

Search has never been about being impartial or promoting “the truth.” Search engineers only talk from that perspective because it is a nice public relations angle for their ad networks. How interested in divine truth can they be when they are willing to sell clicks to just about anyone willing to meet their minimum bid requirements?

Search is about promoting a diversity of remarkable views…which means it often caters to the opinions of whack jobs and mainstream propaganda. If a person lies it is much easier for them to write something remarkable than if they are fair and balanced.

Research has been done on political blogs to show that they don’t cross link to blogs of alternate political ideology very often (and when they do it is often to point sharp criticism rather than to agree). These linking and reading patters lead to a selection bias that over time can warp our view of ourselves and of society. And then there are technologies like search personalization which aim to capture our flaws and feed them back to us, which could make people even more radicalized. And there are patents out there to exploit people’s mental weaknesses. Read this entry ( http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=556 ) about how Google has a patent to target ads to video game players based on mental weaknesses observed during gameplay:

“the dialogue could indicate that the player is aggressive, profane, polite, literate, illiterate, influenced by current culture or subculture, etc. Also decisions made by the players may provide more information such as whether the player is a risk taker, risk averse, aggressive, passive, intelligent, follower, leader, etc. This information may be used and analyzed in order to help select and deliver more relevant ads to users.”

NOTE: SEObook is one of the best online SEO resources: I’m enjoying Aaron’s new SEO Toolbar. Don’t forget to try it out.

Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim has had lots to say on the subject in the past (but probably before Google came right out and admitted that they tweak results). Here he’s talking about What Google SearchWiki Means for Your Ranking

Black Hats Salivate as Google Prepares to add SearchWiki to Algorithm.

I also asked Guy Kawasaki, entrepreneur of note and owner of Alltop.com for his input. He said:

I expect and want Google to provide human input since so many people are trying to game. This is not an issue in my opinion.

You might like to take a look at Alltop’s page for Google.

Barry Welford of The Other Boke’s Blog was of similar opinion to Guy:

In general I believe Google allows its algorithms to determine rankings and I have not seen anything substantive to change that view. Of course they can adjust their algorithms and that might have an effect that some do not like, but it’s not judgement applied directly to what entries appear in the SERPs.

The only situation that I am aware of where human judgment comes in is that apparently they do adjust page rank where a web page sells links (and does not apply rel=nofollow).. However even there I am not sure that affects the implicit PageRank used in rankings as opposed to the visible display of PageRank that they show on their toolbar.

However I see nothing here that will change my relationship with Google.

So, there you have it. A cross-section of professional opinion on how Google does, or does not manipulate what we see in a search result. I am firmly of the opinion that they do manipulate results.

Although I’ve been working conscientiously and diligently to serve my clients with the latest and best SEO techniques, I now feel that more than ever before it’s important to take your online presence into your own hands a bit more and not just leave it to the integrity of the search engines. We’ve obviously been giving them a whole lot more credit than they deserve. I also find Google’s hypocritical attitudes towards Blackhats all the more amazing, under the circumstances. I don’t like out-and-out Blackhats, but I think Google’s policies are a whole lot worse than Blackhats could ever be since they masquerade as ‘industry standard Whitehat.’