The Family Business grows…

One of the cool things about having a business is that you get to make decisions that affect the growth of it. It is also one of the tough things. How fast do you grow it? What do you choose to take on and which do you not?

Eric On Search is no different. From the start, I have told myself that the business is there to serve our family and our family is there to grow it, nurture and feed it, and together all will be better off for its existence. That is the purpose of Eric On Search: To serve our customers and to be profitable for us as a family.

Lately our family has been giving much thought to how best to do that. We have Joint Venture projects underway, along with the day to day coaching customers and as well with the Autism related projects and then there is being the Technologist for a large real estate office (hugely important to me). We want to be world class at all of those endeavors. We will accept nothing less.

I think all entrepreneurs, business people and people in general have been here. I am fortunate though.

Up until today, I have thrown odd projects to my two oldest sons, Cam and Craig. They are young. But they are smart and they care. They do a great job and work hard to live up to the Blackwell family name. I am proud of them. (as I am Jamie, my daughter and Jordan our youngest son (who will likely be assisting Craig in some of this fun!).

I guess I am just letting folks know publicly how jazzed I am that Cam and Craig will be helping me with the behind the scenes maintenance that makes Eric On Search well…Eric On Search. (Yet another name for them to live up to. Yikes.) They will be working as time allows.  You won’t likely see them or hear them.

But like their old man…(grin) you are gonna feel the impact of their results.

Fellas…it is time to get busy. We have some stuff to build! I cannot think of anyone I would rather build stuff with than the two of you.

I mean that.

Ours is a family business in the truest sense of the word.

Online Reputation Managment: The link aging conundrum affects it.

I have a couple of friends. Good people. Both run mid-size companies in the US. Both called me recently. Furious. When you Google the name of their company, a blog or a post from a blog either a) making a disparaging remark (and untrue opinions) about their company or b) apparently taking a controversy from years ago and bringing it up again.

Upon looking it over more closely, there seem to be a NUMBER of these popping up. Old controversies and old untrue posts floating their way back up to the top 10. In my opinion, much of this arises because of what  I call the link aging conundrum. It is described in this post by Jason Lee Miller, to an extent.

Google, in particular, has a tough time in evaluating how much weight to give links based on the age of the link. to wit:

1) To keep longevity in the search engine and maintain the already relevant status of MOST searches for companies, and basic search terms, weighting an older link as MORE valuable helps. It also stops people from looking at others’ links and simply trying to build the same relationships (to an extent).

2) Yet FRESHNESS is a factor as well and recent controversies or news for a company is relevent. (You want your companies press release to get wide coverage and have some longevity as well).

Jason adds into this conundrum the factor of link velocity…I like that idea and concept…but it to has its limitations. How does that apply to a small company or medium company brand…do they have do be on a constant link building binge to avoid getting out ranking by an unfavorable but popular news story about them?

So back to my two friends. They want that CRAP off of the front page. And they have a right to…in one case it is just a bunch of ranting  that a number of other bloggers linked to. It is two year old news even if it was true which it is not. In the other case it is something that was true but is surely no longer relevant, yet my CEO friend has a problem, she cannot get a CURRENT, and legitimate news story about her company to outrank it. Even by linking to legitimate news posts below the old irrelevant story, the aging of the links from the old posts are strong enough (they are from sites that are now authority sites) to make it tough.

Are you smelling what I am cooking?

That is a VERY tough problem to fix algorithmically speaking! It is also an incredibly large problem for Bldg 43 on the Google campus IMO. (I do feel for those guys.).

There is a fine line between accuracy cop and censorship…and the Google folks do a great job balancing that, GIVEN the size of their library stacks and the ever changing nature of their volumes.

There is a REASON that they try to eliminate this irrelevant stuff via algorithm. Can you imagine the volume of calls if they were to take calls from people about which posts in the top 10 to eliminate for whatever reason. Yikes.

So, who are my friends? I am not telling you at this point. (They have not given me permission…) but I will share with you some OTHER MAJOR COMPANIES that are dealing with similar issues.

To my friends: This make or may not make you feel better. You are in good company.    Google the following and check out the Top 10:

Walmart: Union folks mad at ya?

Gillette: RFID? Good grief, that’s been out for a while now Still hatin’ on ‘em for that?

Starbucks: They have their share of haters.

Fritos: Government recall from 2007 still makes news today? That is a lot of corn chips ago!

Speaking about 2007…Aquafina and Dasani (Google either or both!) had a controversy about them being tap water then. Old news..look at those SERPS. Yikes. What is the statute of limitations on this. Aging again.

Sorry Charlie! Google Starkist and you will see how long an internet rumor can mess up SERPS…My guess is that Charlie is gonna be sorry for quite a while…

To my two CEO friends again: If it makes you feel any better, in BOTH of your cases, it does not APPEAR that the folks that own the blogs / sites with the bad stuff are actively building links…Google is likely just giving ‘em a little extra credit for the longevity and that combined with more inbound links to the pages that are linking to THEIR pages naturally over time seem to be doing the trick. THEY MAY BE TOTALLY UNAWARE THAT THEY ARE RANKING THERE. THAT ISSUE MAY BE DEAD AND GONE FOR THEM AND YET YOU STILL DEAL WITH THE EYESORE.

One of you, I advised to build ten or fifteen STRONG pages to make it harder for this to happen (from ANY source..not just the current ones) and to drive away wannabe negativity, and that that simple investment of time would (help) protect you down the road as well. It is still good advise. There is always going to be controversy. Some of the examples above are pathetic in terms of how outrageous and without base they are. And yet (at least in part) they will persist due to the link aging conundrum. Dogs bark…the caravan needs to move on…

I hope that helps. It is the best advice I have for you.

If you’d like me to publicize your individual cases, please let me know. No charge at all for my time. I think you are both getting a raw deal…

Think about what I said though…the best defense is often REALLY good DEFENSE, when it comes to online reputation management.

MIBOR and NAR need an internet education

I have watched a situation unfold that disturbs me greatly. MIBOR and NAR (that would be the National Association of Realtors and Metro Indianapolis) have turned a complaint (apparently from a competitive REALTOR) against several other REALTORS into a decision in Indianapolis that could change the shape of online real estate marketing. To wit:

Agent Genius broke the story (written by one of the affected realtors, Indianapolis REALTOR Paula Henry).  Please read the story before continuing. It is  important. Please read the comments by Jay Thompson. I totally agree with his take on this. NAR and MIBOR are tying the hands of REALTORS whilst freeing 3rd party lead aggregators to take over. Joe Lane echoed those thoughts about NAR and MIBOR on Active Rain.

Further details were added by Morgan Carey on his blog about his conversations (as the webmaster of two of the sites RedDoorIndy and HometoIndy)with NAR and MIBOR. (see that link as well). There were other borkerage sites affected that are not sites that Morgan’s company created. In Morgan’s post  I found NAR’s  misuse of the word scraping to be par for the course, sad to say. Google is NOT a scraper, Google is (essentially) the librarian of the internet. Morgan did a great job of explaining it and (in my opinion) NAR simply does not get it. Scrapers TAKE content. The librarian (Google) simply indexes it. (think: card catalog)

To force members of your organization to deindex pages from the internet library in my estimation is not unlike the decision to burn books at the real library because you find they are offensive to your beleifs or you are afraid of what they teach.

I don’t beleive in that.

Further, it is also bad for business. Google is going to ALLOW quality information to be published. AS THEY SHOULD. As Joe Lane indicated in his post, this will leave NAR members vulnerable to the likes of Trulia and Zillow for internet control of many of the long tail searches that people search for. Why? For the sake of ‘fairness”? Please.

Trulia and Zillow must be smiling while they watch the idiots at MIBOR try to legislate fairness by giving away the store to one third party after another.

In the comments on the AgentGenius post, NAR’s social media person, Todd Carpenter indicated that “maybe it wasn’t so bad for NAR to make it harder for the non listing agents site to rank for these terms.”

Special note to Todd. I have 110 agents (in the office where I work as a technologist) that pay dues that pay your salary. 50% of the deals they do are the selling side and NOT the listing side. If you are gonna be the NAR social media dude…PLEASE realize that buyer’s agents pay for 50% of your salary. Please let NAR in on that little secret as well.

Todd if you do not understand that concept, please resign before stepping on half of the people that pay you again. It is infuriating that you apparently do not get this. You are a nice guy, but favoring 50% of the REALTORS over the other half?

NAR is now left with no good choices.

Perhaps the best choice for the real estate industry as a whole is to do away with them (NAR). Google is a much better librarian than NAR and MIBOR EVER were at being judge, jury and executioner.