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Gordon Brown’s Bigot-gate and the Unsolvable Reputation Nightmare

When British Prime Minister Gordon Brown failed to notice he was still wearing a microphone, and referred to a woman he had spoken to on the street as a bigot, there is no way he could have known exactly how catastrophic a public relations disaster it would be. Within twenty-four hours the internet was abuzz with news of his faux pas, with tweets flying rapidly, blog posts proliferating, every major news outlet running the story, and Facebook and other social media groups springing up to support the woman on the other end of his disparaging remark, Gillian Duffy.

In the world of reputation management, one occasionally encounters an impossible situation. Disasters such as this one have such a wide range of factors leading to negative publicity that it is not just unlikely, but impossible to entirely mitigate the damage. There are two main situations which may occur organically (without a deliberate attack crafted by a competitor) that can cause such a surge of negative PR there is little hope to really solve the problem.

• An international news story. If a brand is faced with a bad situation that’s picked up by the international media as a front-page story, there is little to do but buckle down and wait for the next news cycle. While feeding positive stories to media outlets might mitigate the damage in the long run, in the near-term there is simply no fighting the power that the major news websites have in Google’s live results.

• An internet phenomenon. The grassroots equivalent of an international news story, when a negative PR moment goes viral, there’s little hope in the short term. In Brown’s case, once his story became the lead on the Drudge Report, thousands of blogs were sure to follow suit, creating a landslide of sites carrying the damaging story.

So what can be done in situations like this? With a pivotal election debate only a day out from the breaking news, Brown’s public relations team obviously can’t afford to just sit idly by and let his online reputation be destroyed. In the case of a business, a situation this big and irrevocably would probably be a good time to seriously consider a new company name – rebranding can be the easiest and most cost-effective way to fight thousands or tens of thousands of high-profile negative press. In Brown’s case, of course, that isn’t an option.

Instead, the best way to try to manage the downhill slide of his online reputation is to hire a professional reputation management company to create an explanatory page and target it exclusively with traffic-generating techniques. In this case, Brown would do well to craft an eloquent apology and response to the negative publicity he’s getting. This can then be placed on a separate page on his website. This should be followed by a comprehensive paid ad campaign, targeting every keyphrase surfers are searching for to learn about the scandal, ensuring that the explanatory page is at the top of each of these search listings. This will also ensure it is well placed on blogs and other sites that pull ads from Google based on page content, so that sites carrying the story will have the explanatory page accompanying it.

How Domain Name Squatting Can Negatively Affect Your Brand

There’s a relatively-new, and highly troubling trend in domain name squatting that can affect you and your business quite negatively: personal domain name squatting. While in the past it was relatively common for domain name squatters to buy up high-profile company names, in recent years it has become more and more common for these same people to buy up domain names that are the full names of important executives and key personnel at large companies. These sites are then promoted so that they show up on the first page of a Google search for the name. Then the company attempts to sell the domain name for a hefty fee, essentially extorting the personnel or their parent business in order to regain control over their online reputation.

Now, it’s important to realize that this very likely violates ICANN’s code of use, specifically section 4b, which states that someone has registered a domain in bad faith if: “(i) circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs…”

The thing is, while this has become a relatively cut and dry issue when it comes to actual trademarks, helping to push back the tide of domain squatters, or at the very least making it easy for business to regain their trademarked domains, in the case of personal names the language is a bit more murky. While it seems apparent that registering a personal name of a high-profile person for the purpose of reselling it to them at a huge profit would violate the principle of this rule, in practice it is much more difficult to show someone was operating in bad faith – after all, thousands of people may have the same name, unlike a registered trademark, which is explicitly protected by statute.

Once someone has access to your full name as a domain name, they can do quite a bit of damage to your personal brand. Google and other search engines give a great deal of weight to domains that are formed entirely of a search phrase when determining the results for that phrase, so even with minimal SEO a domain that is your whole name will likely show up near the top of the search results. At its most benevolent this will mean anyone searching for your name will find a parking page, which reflects poorly on you; at its worst the site could forward to pornographic material, material that reflects poorly on you, or a competitor.

Of course, there’s a very easy way to guard against this sort of squatting: either hire a reputable reputation management company, or go out and register the domains that reflect your personal brand in any commonly-used permutations. With the extremely low cost of domain registration, this is an investment that will pay off for years to come.

Google Chrome Extensions for SEO

It was inevitable that Google would eventually release its own web browser, but the steadily-growing success of Google Chrome took even the staunchest advocates by surprise. With more than 12% of internet users now using Chrome, it has obviously become the browser of choice for many power users. As a result, a number of extremely useful plug-ins have been created for Chrome, including many which are highly relevant to SEO professionals. What follows is a sampling of the most useful.

Chrome SEO

Without a doubt the most comprehensive SEO tool available for Google Chrome, Chrome SEO offers a number of features that help speed up the process of SEO. Chrome SEO has some innovative features, such as highlighting all no-follow links on a page, allowing webmasters to quickly and easily see whether sites they link to are linking back.

Chrome SEO also has easy access to cached versions of a webpage; full domain information including Whois, IP, DNS, etc.; number of pages indexed on a site; traffic and rankings on major engines; a robust keyword research tool; social bookmarking data; and backlinks from a page. Chrome SEO makes use of Ask, Bing, Alexa, Digg, Dmoz, Google, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Yahoo, and more, making it one of the most comprehensive suites for any browser.

Best of all, as with many Google Chrome extensions, Chrome SEO is constantly being updated. New features are added every few weeks, and the developer is highly receptive to feedback from the SEO community, making it likely this extension will remain relevant for some time to come.

Meta SEO Inspector

A highly-functional, very usable tool for displaying meta information, the Meta SEO Inspector is seamless and can greatly speed up analyzing pages for SEO. The extension shows things such as the head title, meta tags, XFN tags, microformats, no-follow links, scripts, and other crucial information. Although being able to see this information all in one place is very useful, the Meta SEO Inspector’s best feature is its warning system: if tags are too short or too long, or if tags are improperly formatted, it throws up a red flag. This helps webmasters ensure their meta data is all optimized for Google, increasing search engine relevance with a minimum of time investment.

Link Grabber

Although not explicitly an SEO tool, Link Grabber is one of the fastest, most usable Google Chrome extensions that webmasters will likely find themselves using for SEO. The extension simply takes every single link on a page, opens a new tab, and generates a page with a list of all of the links on it. It’s an incredibly fast way to see how many links a page has, and to see where they lead. 

SEO Quake

This is an extension for Google Chrome that any SEO-driven webmaster who was also a Firefox user will be well acquainted with. SEO Quake is one of the most popular SEO extensions for Firefox, and its Chrome version replicates all of its many features. A top bar includes a wealth of SEO data, including no-follow links, Google PageRank, inbound links, Alexa rank, page age, link density, and more.

Guarding Against Online Sabotage

With the growing importance of online reputation, it makes a great deal of sense that an entire industry would have developed around sabotaging the reputations of competitors. The tactics used ranged from the simple to the incredibly ornate, but because of the nature of the internet even the simplest attacks can be very difficult to protect against. One of the most common tactics, and the most potentially damaging, is that of impersonation.

Online Impersonation

The vast majority of blogs and services allow users to register under any name, without any verification that you are who you say you are. Of course, this makes sense – with the exception of systems such as that used by Amazon, which requires a credit card to confirm your identity, it is virtually impossible to know who someone is online. But it creates an enormous potential for unscrupulous individuals to easily pretend to be you, and do and say whatever they want online under your name.

The first step, if someone has impersonated you online, is to contact the authorities. In most jurisdictions impersonating someone online for negative reasons is against the law. In many jurisdictions there are specific laws protecting your identity on social media sites, blogs, and other specific online forums, and in others more general umbrella statutes against impersonation will protect you. Many areas have special cyber crimes divisions, which can hunt down your impersonator to bring them to justice.

You may also wish to try to track down the impersonator yourself, to inform them that what they are doing is illegal, and to give them the opportunity to reverse the damage themselves. If you contact a blog on which an impersonator has posted, for example, you may be able to explain the situation to them and receive the poster’s IP address, which can help you track them down.

You’ll also want to find out the extent of the damage. A number of services, such as NameChk.com, exist to help you quickly determine whether your name is registered on an enormous range of social media sites. If it is, and you haven’t signed up there, you may want to investigate and see if it is simply someone else with your same name, or if it is a competitor pretending to be you to undermine your online reputation.

Once you know the extent of the damage, and you’ve informed the authorities so they can pursue the impersonator, you can either start to approach websites about removing the negative information, or have an online reputation management company work for you and create positive information to bury the negative results.

Google's Webpage Removal Request Form

One little known tool offered by Google is their Webpage Removal Request Form. This allows webmasters to request that Google remove pages from their index that contain potentially damaging material pertaining to a brand or personal name. Although Google tries very hard not to police these sorts of things by making decisions about questionable content, they do offer this tool for people who feel their name is being truly besmirched by a website out there.

While you can’t simply request a page be taken down for saying something bad about you, there are four cases in which Google says they will remove a page:

    * If a bank account or credit card number is listed
    * If a Social Security number is listed
    * If an accurate image of a signature is listed
    * If the name of a business or personal name is listed on a pornographic site as a way of spamming the search engine

Of these, the first three are unlikely to come into play for most people looking to manage their online reputation – they represent an altogether different sort of problem. The last reason, however, is not uncommon, and is something everyone interested in brand and reputation management should know how to address.

Once a brand becomes sufficiently popular, it will begin registering on various tracking tools as a frequent search. A number of unscrupulous business people harvest these frequent searches en masse, and build pages consisting of lists of those words as a way to spam Google and other search engines, to draw in unsuspecting traffic. These pages generally forward to a pornographic website, a gambling site, or some other site that may use these black hat SEO tactics.

This can be incredibly damaging to your online reputation, as potential customers or employers may think they are going to a site to learn about you, only to be sent to a pornographic site. These listings may also push positive listings down off the first page of results, burying information about yourself or your brand that you want to be shared.

It’s for situations like this that the Google Webpage Removal Request Form exists. The form allows webmasters to submit a site that has their name or brand on it in a spamming context. Each submission is investigated by a human being, and most are handled within only a few days.

Google does request that people first attempt to contact the webmaster responsible for the spamming, before submitting a request. If the webmaster does not respond, then a request may be made to have the offending site entirely removed from the Google index. If the webmaster does respond, and does remove the offending material, a slightly different request can be made using the same form. This alternate request confirms that the webmaster has removed the offending material, and Google then removes the cache of the offending page, so that only the up-to-date, non-offending version of the site remains available to users.

The Value of Online Profiles

Online profiles are a powerful tool in managing one’s online reputation. Because many of the sites that allow users to create their own profiles are well established, with a great deal of weight with search engines, the short amount of time it takes to set up a personal profile can be an incredibly efficient way to get a listing on the first page of search engine results, assisting in managing one’s brand.

Amazon.com Profile

Amazon.com is one of the most trusted sites on the internet, from the perspective of search engines. It has literally hundreds of millions of links pouring in from across the web, updates constantly, and has been around since 1994. It’s hard to imagine a more search-engine lucrative site, and thankfully all of this power can be used to help manage one’s online reputation.

The site actually gives users a number of different ways to get their name on a page, making it ideal for online reputation management. The easiest way is to create a personal profile. Users can create a profile under their Real Name or under a Pen Name; in either case the user’s identity will be verified by using a credit card, helping to guard against identity theft.

To create a profile, one need only log in, and click the Your Profile button underneath the upper search bar. The profile features the real name prominently, as a page title, a header tag, and as many times as one wishes to list it in the content of the page. This, combined with Amazon’s search engine weight , makes it an ideal vehicle for optimization to grab a first page listing for reputation management. A link can also be attached to the profile, giving a strong inbound link to another site used for reputation management.

LookupPage Profile

LookupPage is another excellent site that can be used to build a front-page listing for reputation management. Unlike Amazon and many other older sites, LookupPage is actively designed to get listings on the first page of Google for their clients. This means that a LookupPage profile is optimized explicitly for this purpose, and has an extremely high probability of yielding a front page result.

A LookupPage profile features not only personal information, but also links to sites of the client’s choosing. The service also includes analytics so that users can see what searches led visitors to the profile page, how many arrived, and other important data to help analyze what people are looking for.

Finally, LookupPage offers a Pro level which includes a number of premium features. These include inclusion in a LookupPage directory, a direct messaging system, and a higher level of optimization.

Social Media Profiles

Virtually any modern social media site allows users to create profile pages of varying degrees of comprehensiveness and be used for online reputation management. Even at their most minimal, these pages still allow for multiple listings of a person’s name, and at more advanced levels they may allow extensive bios, embedded links, and more, all helping one to better manage their online reputation.

Three Unique Forms of Linkbait

One of the key concepts in improving the placement of a page in search engine results is attracting links. Some strategies focus on attracting massive numbers of links, others focus on attracting a small number of high-quality links, and others take a hybrid approach. Whatever the overarching philosophy of link quality, everyone involved in online reputation management is on some level driven to get links.

There are many different ways to get links, from trading links with high-profile sites, to buying masses of links from firms that specialize in supplying them, to creating one’s own pages to interlink. One of the most effective ways to get links, however, is known as ‘linkbaiting’, and consists of creating content built to attract a specific audience. Linkbait might be an informative blog post that gets picked up by an aggregator, a series of photographs that receives attention from around the blogosphere, or simply a service so useful everyone wants to share it. There are a few types of tricky linkbait, however, which tend to attract large numbers of links with varying degrees of work required.

Infographics

The hot new thing is the infographic. It seems like every blog, magazine, television show, and newspaper is eager to provide infographics for just about any piece of data they can come up. People love statistics, and they love pictures, so a marriage of the two is a sure-fire success. And people love linking to infographics. It takes their audience only an instant to absorb the infographic, rather than taking them away for good the way a link to a blog post or news story might do, and if they embed a thumbnail of the infographic they have a high-impact image to add to their site.

The best part for the web marketer is that infographics are quite easy to create. A simple pie chart, or even text laid out nicely with various blocks of color and data listed, is all it takes to make the most basic infographics. Creative use of icons or small images can take infographics to the next level. And every business or business model has potential infographics: anywhere data exists, it can be transformed into a visual representation.

Flash Games

Although relatively resource-intensive to produce, the Flash game is one of the most time-tested forms of linkbait in existence. Major brands around the world have discovered just how useful such games can be not only in attracting massive numbers of links, but also in building brand recognition in a very receptive audience. Best of all, a number of companies have sprung up to supply Flash games at an affordable rate.

Quizzes

Anyone who’s spent time on Facebook can tell you that there seems to be nothing more addictive to the average internet user than a quiz. People love answering questions to discover something about themselves – no matter how off the mark the final assessment might be. Tools exist online to create a quiz in literally a matter of minutes, and by tailoring it to fit the target brand, it adds a level of relevance as well as creating a major attractor.

What Makes a Good Online Reputation Management Company?

Online reputation management is here to stay, of that there’s no doubt. Countless stories have been written on the importance of managing an online reputation, key movers in the business world have spoken on the necessity of managing one’s online résumé, and thousands of firms have sprung up almost overnight to fill the need. With all of these companies now operating, it can be difficult for someone new to the world of online reputation management to know what to look for to differentiate the good from the bad. There are a few easy things to watch out for, though:

Does the Company Have a Reputation?

It should go without saying, but looking into the company reputation is one of the most overlooked steps towards choosing the right firm. Because the majority of people using these services are relatively web and business savvy, reviews and critiques are numerous, and generally only a short search away. Of course, it’s important to be sure of the credibility of the reviewer as well – because of the nature of the business, one must expect plenty of false positive reviews written by the company itself, and plenty of false negative reviews written by competitors.

How Does the Company Perform in Search Engines?

Another easy test that is often overlooked is running a simple keyword search for phrases that the company appears to be using to describe its own business. Because online reputation management is ultimately a game of maneuvering search engines to result in desired placement, how well a company is able to do this for themselves is very telling. If a company uses the phrase, “online reputation management firm” time and time again on their site, for example, one can safely assume they are targeting that as a pivotal key phrase. If they fail to show up in the first page of Google results for one of their top key phrases, their efficacy as a business should at the very least be questioned.

Is the Company Made Up of Real People?

Because online reputation management is such a lucrative business, and because it is such an open field, there exist many cookie-cutter sites that offer very little of substance, but try to package it well. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to reputation management, and it’s important to find a company that is willing to take a personal interest in managing the brand. A company with professionals listed, along with their credentials and some history, is much more likely to take that extra step than a larger, faceless firm.

Do They Know Their Stuff?

Although it’s impossible to tell how good a company will be at their job before seeing them perform it, one can get a good general idea of how informed they are on their field by supplemental materials they publish. Blogs, articles, and other support information play a key role in search engine optimization, so all firms will include such materials. Whether or not these materials demonstrate a knowledge of the field, and show a level of sophistication, is a key factor in determining how likely they will be to succeed in managing a target brand’s reputation.

Using the Same Domain to Bury Bad Publicity

Receiving bad publicity can be a devastating blow to a brand’s online reputation, and in order to mitigate the damage often the best course of action is to try to create enough alternate content to push the negative publicity down to the second, third, or even deeper, search result pages. Most people do this by creating a number of different pages on new or alternate domains, but in fact it can be much more effective to try to create pages on the same domain.

This is because of the way Google works – often a bit of negative publicity will be on a page with a high ranking itself, and in those cases pushing the listing down can be a great deal of work. Google, however, generally will include only one site from a given domain on the first page – although for larger sites it may include one or two additional links from a domain indented slightly below the first. What this means is that if a newer, more-linked-to page appears on a domain, it will likely replace the negative page, and the negative page will be relegated to much deeper in the Google stack.

Of course, this is of no use if the negative publicity comes from a private website. For any site that allows the public to interact, however, a sophisticated marketer can hope to sublimate the negative review. A few cases studies might help demonstrate how this is possible:

Public blogs are one place where negative publicity might show up. For example, when there is a system in place for community members to create their own profile pages, if a negative post appears on the site, a marketer can create a profile page using their brand name, and point external links to it to ensure it has a higher rating than the negative page.

Often a first page result will be drawn from one of the major social news aggregators, such as Reddit or Digg. The story itself may not appear in the first page of results, but if the Digg or Reddit synopsis appears, it will still drive traffic to the negative publicity. The easiest way to deal with this is to create a story that utilizes the target brand name, and push votes to it to make it more popular than the negative lead.

News stories are another key source of negative publicity, and with Google’s live search results they have become increasingly important. A news story at a regional paper can easily stay in the top page of search results for some time, and it might seem like it would be difficult to get a newspaper to publish something from a non-reporter. In fact, it is quite easy. Marketers can simply write letters to the editor and submit them regularly until one is picked up, using the target brand name (much easier if the brand is a personal name, as the letter can be written from that name). Once the letter to the editor is published, external links can then be directed to it to make it the more relevant story from that domain.

Free Tips for Managing your Online Reputation from LookupPage

One of the issues when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) brand management is how to overcome bad press released onto the news websites. Such negative press may find its way to top ranked positions on the leading search engines for product and company names, so if and when this does happen, what can be done to combat such situations? It is possible to push down the ranking of negative comments on all search engines and here are some top tips on how to achieve this through good online reputation management:

1. Compile a list of your search keywords - including common misspellings and abbreviations. Keep in mind that people often shorten brand names when communicating via the social web, such as sites like Twitter who only allow a specific number of characters in each update.

2. Be active on online forums and any other websites which offer you the chance to post your profile. Always make sure that your profile name corresponds to the search term you wish to promote, and that you can fully control the content on that website.

3. Organize a Skype interview or Podcast relating to the search term. It is important to make sure that the client interviews in the most positive of terms and that the interviewer posts online to as many different websites as possible.

4. Create a Google alert for your targeted search term and Google will send you a message every time your keyword is searched.

5. Write articles and press releases around the subject matter you wish to promote - make sure you upload them to networking sites likely to bring traffic and attention to your search term.

In other words, utilize all and every online opportunity to promote your search term and keywords.

Using the services of LookupPage will not only ensure that your online presence is strengthened but for a minimum cost, you can enjoy your own personal domain to be promoted on the first page of all major search engines. For example search for "Oxford Car Service" on Google to see an example page.

To start benefiting from this upgraded service follow these simple steps:

1.     Sign up to LookupPage.
2.     Click the "My Account" tab.
3.     Click on "Upgrade/ Renew your Subscription" link.
4.     Choose the "Pro" package and purchase.

Now start to manage your online reputation for a safer and more confident future!

Even Winning a Lawsuit Won’t Remove Negative Publicity

Maintaining your online reputation can be a monumental task, with what can seem like an endless stream of people ready to post negative and disparaging things about your brand all across the web. Worst of all, the worst of these are generally done anonymously, so that you cannot contact the offending poster, or try to interact with them. When your brand name is dragged through the mud, many people are drawn to the idea of filing a lawsuit for libel – after all, if such things were published in a traditional media outlet, that would be the obvious course of action.

Unfortunately, the rules governing the internet are somewhat different, and even if you should win a case that demonstrates something is libel, it will rarely actually remove the negative publicity. The trick has to do with how a website is viewed in relation to traditional media. If I own a magazine, and a journalist writes something anonymously and submits it, and I then publish it, I can be held liable in court for defamation, since I was the publisher. So if you were to sue me, and I was found guilty, I would have to stop distributing my libelous material. On the other hand, if I own a bookstore, and I carry something that is later deemed libelous, I am not liable in the least – it is considered too difficult for me to sort through everything I carry to see if there is anything potentially actionable.

In the early days of the public internet it fell to the courts to decide whether website operators were more like publishers or distributors, and they often disagreed. In 1996, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, which spelled out very clearly that websites were to be treated like distributors, and not to be held responsible for anything posted by a third party. Although there are exceptions made – such as child pornography or other criminal material – this basically means that a website providing a forum for discussion won’t be held responsible for the discussion that goes on there.

That means that even if someone posts libelous material on a public review site, for example, and you win a case showing it to be libelous, the website operator themselves will not be held responsible for the material. So after countless court costs, and a potentially very public case, the offending material may still be left up. In fact, pursuing legal action can have a major consequence many people don’t foresee: if news media latches on to the story, your online reputation may be dominated for weeks or months by high-ranking news sites featuring a story you most likely don’t want to be the defining image of your brand on the web.

Instead of going to court, many people find it is both easier and more effective to try alternative ways to mitigate negative publicity. Although it is tempting to want to have bad press removed from the internet forever, this simply isn’t feasible 99% of the time. Instead, most businesses find that by strategically burying negative publicity, they can effectively make it disappear without the headache.

Why Google is All That (Really) Matters

Spend enough time reading about online reputation management and online marketing, and you’ll begin to notice one thing very clearly: people rarely talk about search engines. Instead, they talk about Google. If you spoke only to online marketers, it would be easy to come away with the impression that no other search engines exist – that Google was the only thing anyone selling a product or service online cared about. And the truth is, in many ways, that’s true.

One need only look at the global market share of the major search engines to get a feel for why that is. As of February, 2010, the breakdown looked something like this: Google, 85.74%; Yahoo, 6.09%; Bing, 3.39%; Baidu, 2.61%; Ask, 0.63%; AOL, 0.48%; MSN, 0.08%; and so on to ever smaller and smaller portions. To put that into perspective: Google has more than 14 times as much traffic as the number two slot, more than 25 times as much as the number three, and more than 1071 times as much as the number seven. So Google is, without a doubt, the uncontested master of the search engine space, and this isn’t something that seems likely to change anytime soon; hundreds of millions of dollars of development, the backing of a well-established brand, and one of the biggest online ad campaigns later, and Microsoft’s Bing is still just barely peeking above 3%.

But the relevance of Google doesn’t end simply with its search engine share. Google is also the most robust search engine in terms of it's search engine algorithms, and its discipline in investigating suspicious behavior on the part of websites. It is easier to get blacklisted from Google than any other website, and it is more difficult to get a high ranking with them than anyone else. While that might seem like it would discourage marketers from spending the time and energy on the search engine, with their market share too large to ignore it has the opposite effect: if you focus exclusively on succeeding with Google, you can be fairly confident that every other search engine will find you acceptable.

Finally, there is the question of toolbox: with such a monumental market share, and the best suite of advertising and marketing tools of any major engine, nearly everyone who dedicates themselves to search engine optimization spends the bulk of their time on Google. This creates a snowball effect: as the massive body of material already developed for Google makes it more attractive for other marketers, who spend their time analyzing Google, and in turn write even more about how to market for Google, repeating the cycle. 

The community energy dedicated to understanding the Google algorithms, the number of tools built exclusively to analyze Google results, and the level of interactivity Google offers its marketers all make it the obvious choice. So, the next time you hear a marketer talking about Google as though it is the only search engine on the planet, understand that this is only because by making their sites perfect for Google, they are not only immediately targeting more than 85% of search traffic, they are also creating sites that every other search engine will likely view favorably as well.