They send you an email every time that happens, apologizing and telling you they're trying to get the book to you as fast as they can. That's fine the first time, a bit annoying but still fine the second time, and becomes really annoying (as in: blog-post worthy annoying), when it happens 3 times within 4-5 months...

These emails are automated, and if I were working at bol.com, I'd start doing something extra for my clients when stuff like this happens. If you know it's happened a few times, and trust me, they keep track of everything there, why not give me a coupon for my next purchase? How would you handle situations like these?

Unreliable delivery times at Bol.com is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I'd love to push the reset button, take the responsibility for having done a stupid thing and hope the community can move on.

We can move on, but we also have to learn. And I was in the lucky circumstance today, that I could immediately prevent myself from making the same sort of mistake Danny did. I found a way to get a juice passing link from a major search engine today, and this posts initial content detailed how to do that. Reading Danny's post made me decide not to do that, and instead mail my comments to my contacts at that search engine.

So, thank you, Danny, for making that mistake and allowing us to learn from it.

Reputation Management done right is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

It's pretty darn simple, actually: I had MSN Messenger and Live Messenger installed. Somehow these two kept bumping into each other, so you should remove MSN Messenger, and all works flawlessly again. Follow these simple steps, and you will be cured of the problem as well:

1. Shut down Messenger.
2. Click Start
3. Click Run
4. enter "%appdata%\microsoft" (without the quotes) and press Enter.
5. You're now in your application data folder.
6. Delete the MSN Messenger folder.
7. Start up Messenger again.

That fixed it for me, hope it helps you out as well!

MSN / Live Messenger problems is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Build a few links to that and I think it'll rank like a charm!

Spock: Another Search Engine Reputation Management Resource is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Now it has been known for quite a while that MSN censors URL's, as covered here for instance, but I had not ever heard of them censoring out complete TLD's... This is, IMHO, insane... Come on Microsoft, stop doing this sort of nonsense!

Microsoft Censoring .info domains in MSN Messenger is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The first one was one I found over at SEOBlackhat, in a post from december 2005 (you're always way ahead of me Andrew):

My solution would be to point alot of high value links at OTHER parts of the SEC site that have your companies name listed. The best would be blowout earnings numbers or other positive results. Google is not likely to show more than 2 results in the SERPs from the SEC about your site. So if you Googlebomb your own companies name to different pages on the SEC website, those pages would likely usurp the negative article in the SERPs.

This would work for larger types of sites, news sites etc., that don't have any specific grudge against you. If you'd do this with a blogger like me, I'd 301 the post you're linking to into my bad post about you, and you'd be dead... But I guess this could work for the CNN.com's and alike of this world. I guess you could call this greyish, but I'd consider doing it for clients.

Another method, and this one I can't try at Onetomarket, is duplicating the negative page about your brand on your own domain, somewhat better optimized, but cloaked. You might be able to trick the duplicate content filter into believing the content was originally on your domain, thus dropping the other domain from the SERPs. The version you'd show to the user could show your story and how your company greatly solved this inconvenient problem.

If someone tries this, let me know if it worked for you :)

Greyhat and Blackhat SERM techniques is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Using subdomains and cc-tld's you should, as a SERM specialist, not try to block more than six results out of the first ten. If you do, sooner or later, a Search engine engineer is going to come by, decide it's a bad user experience, and push a few of those subdomains or cc-tld's down a few spots. Or worse: users might still find those negative reviews you pushed down.

Let's take it from the beginning: if someone is searching for your brand or product name, they're either trying to find the website for it, or they're trying to find opinions about it. That's a different intent. The first searcher will immediately click on the first result, and might not even see the other results. For this searcher, blocking the first page is good enough, even if it is with subdomains or different cc-tld's. The other searcher however, is looking for opinions of other consumers. Blocking the complete top 10 with subdomains and cc-tld's will force him to go to the second and even the third search result page, and he might still find this one negative article you've so violently pushed down...

For this type of searcher (and the more internet savvy people become, the more they will use search engines for "research" like this) you will have to make other arrangements. You have to give him what he wants, because that is what search marketing is all about, all the time. So you should make sure that out of those top 10 results, 2 or 3 are positive reviews about your company or your product.

Now don't over-do this either! Don't put blatant commercials up there, because people won't believe them... Just pick some natural looking articles on the brand or product of your choice with decent titles and descriptions somewhere between the 50th and 100th result, throw a few links from your main domain to them, and they'll probably start ranking higher up. Now if someone were to come through, and rank in the top 10 with a negative article, you've got a few positive articles around it, hugely softening the bad feeling this listing might have caused if the article were to be listed among 9 subdomains and cc-tld's... People will accept some negative criticism towards your product, as long as there are more positive sounds surrounding it.

This way, you're using Search Engine Reputation Management to enhance and strengthen your reputation, instead of just as a prevention or damage control mechanism... Taking it further then defensive action, treating it like this really is managing your reputation.

Search Engine Reputation Management: make it look natural is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

After 2 days, they thought to know what the problem was, and guaranteed me that it would be fixed within 3 business days. After having laughed hard at the woman who said "we will call you" (after all, which number would they call me on, they hadn't bothered to take my cell number and the other phone number obviously wasn't working), I hung up feeling quite certain that I would be called back within a few days.

For 2.5 days, I didn't hear anything, so I started calling again. They actually had the guts to say to me: "we've been trying to call you"... "on your home phone"... I tell you, Tele2 employees are a complete bunch of idiots... After 4,5 days with a lot of phone conversations, they finally found out what the error was, something, it turned out, they could have found out within 2 minutes of my first call, had they been thinking clearly. So, it wasn't something I could fix, and they wanted to send in a technician... Next opportunity for that man to come to my place: may 8th... NOW COME ON! I got extremely mad, as they had PROMISED me the problem would be fixed within 3 business days. I won't bore you any longer: I went to a UPC store, got an installment package, and within 15 minutes of starting to install it, I was checking my e-mail.

Conclusion: Tele2 sucks

So: Tele2 SUCKS. Now I'm not the only one with trouble with Tele2, two weeks ago, thousands of tele2 customers didn't have access to their e-mail for 2 full days. So: don't switch to Tele2, the company that brings you small bills... and major headaches.

Tele2 sucks, but I’m back online is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Personal search history creeping into SERPs is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!