Shedding Light on Black PR

February 20th, 2013 | Shonali Burke |

 

 

 

Terri Johnson tipped me off to a fascinating story yesterday. It’s an exposé of China’s “black PR industry.”
I had no idea such a thing existed, but here is how Charlie Custer, who summarized it for Tech in Asia, explains it:

“Black PR firms provide client companies with both post deletion services to help them escape negative news stories, and some also provide placement for soft ads and hit pieces attacking competitors. The top black PR firms can offer these services even for stories posted to China’s most popular news portals.”

Image: Arjen Toet via Flickr, CC 2.0
The bit about placing soft ads and hit pieces won’t shock or surprise you, since we’ve seen that happen here in the U.S. as well, disgusting as the practice is. And reputation management is often a large part of what we, as PR professionals, do; for some, it’s what they specialize in and focus on.

In fact, even those who don’t think they do it, probably do. For example, content marketing is as much about reputation as anything else; after all, we (organizations, or clients, or simply human beings) want people to think well of us, and to come to us for the right reasons… right?
Scrubbing the Internet
There are also numerous companies that offer to “scrub” your reputation for you (for varying amounts of money), or teach you how to do it yourself; though at least in the U.S., most people know enough to not overtly promote “black hat SEO” tactics to do so. In fact, companies like BrandYourself tell you point blank what they won’t do.
The approach I’ve seen (so far) from such firms primarily involves getting higher rankings for “relevant” and desired links, by tweaking keywords, generating useful content, etc… mostly in an above-board manner. This, again, is not a surprise. (I’ve never used BY, btw, I just found them when I was researching companies that offer this kind of service… case in point.)
But here is where I started to narrow my eyes as I read the article:

among other things, these “black PR” firms offer to delete negative articles and post “hit” pieces to China’s most popular news portals.

Not (just) search engines. Not pitch stories. Actually delete from, and post to, news portals.
The dirty saga in a nutshell


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Which country search index is your page in?

By Mike Moran
　
People love to talk about whether you Web page is in the search index. The search index. Like there’s one. If only it were that easy. First off, there is at least one search index for every search engine, so Bing has one, Google has one, and so does every search engine in every country around the world. But it’s even more complex than that. Google and Bing have a separate search index for every country. And, in fact, they sometimes have multiple search indexes for a single country, when a country has more than one popular language. (I am looking at you, Switzerland.) So what does a search marketer do about making sure a Web page is in the right country index.
The language stuff works fairly well–Google and other search engines generally detect the proper language from the words on the page themselves, but country is another issue entirely. Most languages are spoken in multiple countries and it’s not possible today for a computer to correctly detect the language frequently enough–the search engines need our help.
In the old days of search marketing, this was a vexing problem. Search engines generally looked at only two things when deciding to put a page in a country index–the domain name of the site and the location of the server that hosted it. So, if your page was ibm.de, then it would correctly put it in the German index. Or if the Web server of that page was located in Germany, that worked, too.
But when I worked at IBM, there was no page for ibm.de–it was ibm.com/de–and it was located in a central server hosting site with 20 other country sites. And we were mostly out of luck if we didn’t want to change one of those things. Most multinational companies were in the same boat.

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