Negative PR is still PR.
Did you know that according to the study carried out a few years ago an average unhappy customer would tell 10 of their friends about their negative experience. These friends will in their turn tell around 5 more people. If you leave enough of your customers angry with your product/service you will pretty much start a negative viral boom. This can often considerably damage your business to the point of you going bankrupt. Nobody would want this to happen to them. Or would they?
When it comes to backlinks there is no such thing as a negative backlink. If I point to Live search with Live search sucks I will only be giving it a boost in terms of seo. This is in fact very similar to what has happened to me. Do you remember my post on generating money with Freecycle? Have a look at some of the comments. When writing that blog post I had no idea what a can of warms I was opening. I ended up causing an absolute outrage within Freecycle community. They were so disgusted with my blog that they would go around telling everyone about my shameless money generating method. At one point I had so much traffic coming in I thought about turning the Wordpress supercache on. Best of all however, every time they were mentioning my “terrible” blog on various forums, blogs and social networks… you guessed it! I was getting a backlink.
PS: I’m sorry Freecycle but I promised myself there will be no subject no matter how controversial, that I would not cover on my blog.
July 6th, 2008 at 3:34 am
lol, yeh thats true..
i am disappointed with my PR too.
July 6th, 2008 at 5:28 am
I agree with this post, but i would rather generate a valuable reputation, so as to bring back vistors rather than rushing them away,
Traffic is worth a lot more than Page rank Imo,
But i definatly see where you are coming from
July 6th, 2008 at 7:22 am
Wow… that’s awesome…. Yah, some people i have told about how cool of an idea you had, they were all like “oh my god i cant believe he’d do that.”…it’s funny.
July 6th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Backlinks are backlinks
I personally skipped that article just because the headline is self-explanatory… The same goes with any kind of arbitrage… be it freecyle to ebay or craigslist to ebay etc etc.
If someone is giving something away who cares if it gets sold… if they truly cared they would’ve sold it themselves.
July 6th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
By PR I mean public relations by the way. Not page rank.
July 7th, 2008 at 4:28 am
yes.. I agree with you.. Negative is always easy to spreading around the world..
July 7th, 2008 at 6:55 am
I meant pr for backlinks haha but I can see where that may’ve not been clear.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
For the purposes of just getting links, you’re right about no such thing a a bad link. Traditional business has to do reputation management but if you want to just get a bunch of links than go ahead and say something “bat-shit crazy” so you can get people linking to you. Lots of people have figured this out which is why there have been so many articles titled “SEO Is Dead” or “SEO’s are Satan Incarnate” written by sneaky marketers trying to get a reaction and most importantly - links.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
If the negative PR is in your particular industry in your country that could be more negative then the links are worth if you were building a brand.
But a strategy like this to another niche market could bring backlinks from key locations that could take months to achieve by trying to submit then yourself.
I would not do it for my primary domain but would most probably think about it for a secondary domain to test its effectiveness.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:30 am
That makes a lot of sense, because no matter what, like you say, you are getting backlinks, for various different key phrases!
Not sure this is something a person should plan, but, take it as it comes.
July 12th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Good post, and good points made. In that case, there should be a few things I have said in the past that will generate a tonn of links for me. H aha
July 31st, 2008 at 2:33 pm
I agree pr is pr whether it is good or bad.
October 19th, 2008 at 1:22 am
Very often negative PR and opinions are very easy to be spread and found online when Googlers check your company’s background on the http://www.