These days, searching the name of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum turns up mostly relevant results: a Wikipedia page, his official campaign site, and a Twitter account. But that wasn’t always the case.
For a long time, Mr. Santorum’s name turned up some unexpected results.
However, that’s just the sort of reputation problem that Pete Kistler, Patrick Ambron, and Evan McGowan-Watson want to solve—but on a smaller scale. Their company, BrandYourself, is billed as a “DIY platform that makes it simple for anyone to take control of their own search results.” The concept turned heads at last week’s 4th annual SXSW Accelerator awards, where it won the honor of Best Bootstrapped Startup.
BrandYourself exists within the larger community of so-called reputation sites—services that work to push nefarious, inaccurate, or untrue results further down a search engine’s ranks. The problem is that big-name sites such as Reputation.com are often geared towards big businesses or public figures like Mr. Santorum, both in scope and price.
“You’re paying them to have a team of search scientists do [Search Engine Optimization (SEO)] for you,” Mr. Ambron told Ars. “And it usually starts at a couple grand a year and quickly starts going up, often many times more than that.”
Mr. Ambron points to his cofounder, Mr. Kistler, who found it difficult to get an internship in college when search results turned up a drug dealer of the same name. Or, in another case, a professor falsely accused of shoplifting from a Gap store had negative news reports overtake previous search results for his name.
“Everybody should be doing this, but most people don’t have that type of money,” Mr. Ambron says, “and they don’t know how SEO works. So we wanted to create a free, DIY platform.”
He uses the term DIY often, and it’s part of the reason why BrandYourself is so novel. The site walks users through a step-by-step process to help identify positive and negative links for a given search results, and then offers tips and suggestions on how to potentially move those positive links up.
Free users can submit up to three links that they want to optimize, and the site guides them through a “boosting” process, which outlines smart—and safe—SEO modifications that can be used to help Google or Bing more appropriately rank and index the site. The process is completely transparent, and tooltips explain exactly what each change does to improve the ranking of your site.
Some, like sharing links on social media, might seem like common sense. But others, such as keyword placement and density, are less obvious.
Google, for example, actually has an entire YouTube channel devoted to Webmaster tips, many of them focused on successful approaches to SEO. So while when Mr. Ambron boasts of being “100 per-cent basically search-engine approved,” it doesn’t mean his company has been endorsed by Google, but the techniques used are some of the search engine’s own recommendations.
What Mr. Ambron can’t do is guarantee a given search term will rank at the top, or even determine placement lower in the results. “All we can do is help you optimize certain content so it shows up as high as it possibly can,” he says.
Even Google has tried to dispel the myth that good SEO automatically means better rankings. “It’s not the case that just because somebody has done optimization it’s automatically better than a site that hasn’t done optimization,” says one of the videos on the company’s Webmaster tips YouTube channel. “We want sites to be able to rank well on the basis of merit. If they’re good, they should show up in search results. That’s our basic philosophy.”
That’s also part of BrandYourself’s philosophy too. While competitors are often accused of using black hat SEO techniques to quickly send certain search terms to the top of Google or Bing’s rankings, Mr. Ambron and company are more concerned with boosting the relevant content users have already created.
In fact, so much of the attention around reputation services focuses on burying untrue or negative content that it’s easy to forget that they can also help increase the visibility or Web presence of those who have none in the first place. That means encouraging Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or About.me accounts to figure prominently in search results, and walking you through the process of creating effective pages and profiles if they don’t yet exist.
Since re-launching the BrandYourself site at SXSW, Mr. Ambron told Ars they’ve attracted over 10,000 new users. “It’s not realistic or sustainable, for a person who’s just trying to control the search results for their name, to pay a company to do that process for them. They should be able to do it themselves,” he says.
And unlike his pricier competitors, he claims, “most people can get everything they need done for free.”