If you watch enough TV (in this case, ‘enough’ is probably an hour a week) you’ve seen a crime drama. And if you’ve seen a crime drama, you know that at least 30 seconds of each show is always dedicated to somebody scolding someone else for contaminating the crime scene with boot-prints, finger-prints, their own blood, whatever…

Catching up on my weekly reading I stumbled across the story of Liskula Cohen, a model who is suing Google to release the identity of a Blogspot blogger who has allegedly defamed her character. The TechCrunch article states “It’s nearly impossible to identify bloggers who don’t reveal their real name without the help of the companies that maintain publishing platforms.” but as we all know from recent history (Walmart’s Jim and Laura, JoyniceKanellis), there is almost always a way to find out someone’s identity, and SEO’s make great detectives…

Turning this into a public media circus is certainly not the least-damaging way to manage it, for two reasons: one, the linking profile of the Skanks in NYC Blog is now totally lopsided with parroted news reports from all over the web (and articles like this one) and two, news stories about you suing some “defenseless blogger” from sites like TechCrunch, CNet, Wired, etc. are 10x more likely to show up for a search of your name than some PR N/A Blogspot blog ever was.

Okay, so maybe obfuscating the linking profile of the blog isn’t the worst thing in the world, but the truth is that if you run a blog for any significant period of time, eventually you’re going to drop a link to it from somewhere where you don’t have anonymity. Even a forum-handle can be the key that unlocks a whole wealth of information about your past (see the JoyniceKanellis example above). A skilled Online Reputation Management firm could have deduced the attacker’s identity from linking profiles, keywords, nicknames, etc. and a lawsuit could have been filed under the radar.

It’s possible I don’t know how the world of modeling works, and maybe coming off as attention-seeking or as being the kind of person to hang a picture with a sledgehammer is desirable in the modeling community. It seems to me that it would make more sense to play the lawyer card on a real author or journalist who defames you in a real publication, not some two-bit blogger who can’t even afford a domain name.

As hurtful as it may be to see this kind of thing printed about you, let’s think about what the real exposure was, and what it will be now:

* I seriously doubt (but can’t confirm) that searching for her name + the word “skank” produced any more than 1 relevant result before this frenzy, probably from the blog in question, if even that. And to be honest, if someone is searching for “[your name] skank,” they’ve already formed an opinion of you.

* Big news sites picked up the lawsuit story, and 2 of them already rank for a search of Liskula Cohen. Now 20% of the results feature her name and the word “skank” in the same headline.

* You have no recourse against news sites because they are simply reporting on the court proceedings, someone searching for your name will now almost certainly see your name associated with the word “skank” in the future.

I understand that seeing pictures of yourself with such hateful words printed could be enraging, but in my opinion, public celebrities need to expect some amount of that kind of thing. So what would be my first line of defense? Cut ‘em off at the knees.

Someone who starts a blog to say these things wants traffic, otherwise they’d just email it. There are many ways to have a site demoted or removed from search engines, especially on a weak subdomain with few incoming links of its own, and in a neighborhood as bad as Blogspot (Blogspot? A bad neighborhood?! Bull!).

As it stands now, all this attention is probably making ‘Skanks in NYC’ one of the most powerful blogsot sudomains in history (up there with Stuff White People Like), which makes it a thousand times harder to “de-optimize”.

By applying a few blackhat SEO tactics quietly, this blog could have been made to never rank for anything for the rest of its existence, and would either discourage its creator, or enrage him/her to the point where they come out of hiding (probably to DigitalPoint asking why they don’t rank for “liskula cohen skank”). No media craziness, no permanent “skank” stamp on your personal Google results.

But what do I know about being a model? Or a CSI for that matter…

Tags: boot prints, finger prints, google, great detectives, media circus, online reputation management, walmart

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Business, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.