Why TruReputation Score measures sentiment

The number of backlinks a Web site has is meaningless for a variety of reasons. In search engine optimization counting backlinks is a waste of time because you don’t know:

• What the anchor text for those links may be
• Which search engines have indexed the backlinks
• Which search engines allow the backlinks to pass value
• Which backlinks the search engines know about that they are not showing to you
• Which backlinks pass the most value
• Which backlinks pass the least value

If you’re comparing two sites at a glance and you find one site has 1,000 times as many inbound links as the other, that tells you which site probably has more search and link visibility. That’s all. Nonetheless, there are people in the SEO community who devote most of their time to discussing backlinks as if counting backlinks provides some sort of value to search engine optimization.

Of course, mere search engine optimization has become passe. The buzzword du jour for the past year-and-a-half has been “reputation management” — specifically “online reputation management” for the SEO industry. And in typical SEO fashion, many people have transferred the worthless backlink metric from search marketing to their online reputation management marketing.

Search reputation management is the step-child of the step-child called SEO. There are no best practices in the search reputation management industry — just everyone’s idea of what you should be doing. And, of course, many people feel for some unjustifiable reason (other than “that’s what we do in traditional SEO”) that it’s important to count backlinks in search reputation management.

To date no one has been able to justify the completely unnecessary obsession with backlink counts in search engine optimization so I’m not holding my breath waiting for anyone to figure out a reasonable justification for online reputation management. It’s just an old SEO hillbilly “that’s the way my grandpa did it” recipe for search moonshine. Some of the hillbillies get lucky and cook up some pretty good shine — but they don’t realize they could do it quicker, more efficiently with less fuss.

Then last week we launched TruReputation Score and people immediately signed up in droves to play with it. A few folks engaged in public head-scratching (some conveniently neglecting to mention they were pluigging their own reputation management services through links while discounting the value of TruReputation Score tool).

For the legitimate head scratchers I’ve posted an explanation of TruReputation Score’s sentiment-based approach at Best SEO Blog. Sentiment is the key to understanding and managing an online reputation, regardless of where the reputation exists.

The Internet can be divided into spheres and sub-spheres and has been a hundred different ways. We have the traditional Web, Web 2.0, Social Media, forums, blogs, consumer-generated content, user-generated content, interactive media, news media, marketing media, media for media that haven’t yet been named, and so on. In all of these regions and redefinitions of the Web you can find reputations both good and bad.

The SEO community doesn’t quite get the whole “reputation” thing, however. Many SEOs, in order to prove they are ready to manage your online reputation, have flooded the search results for their names with social media profiles. That’s not a reputation. It may serve as a reputation shield if it keeps the bad things out, but a real reputation is comprised of the comments other people make about you.

My real reputation includes many negative as well as many positive things that people have said about me through the years. It’s not what I say about myself that matters so much as what other people say about me. I’m not selling myself as a commodity — I don’t have to pitch myself to you on the basis of what 3 out of 4 doctors say about me in surveys. If I were an independent search consultant again, sure, I would need an effective marketing campaign.

And there are people and companies who use their marketing campaigns to influence their search reputations, so it’s most certainly a valid practice. But when you’re trying to evaluate your online reputation do you really want to be influenced by your own marketing campaign?

Visible Technologies has invested millions of dollars in developing technologies that find, measure, and grade sentiment. We have many tools, many services that help our customers understand what people are saying online and how those comments affect brand values. The TruReputation Score tool is just the barest gleam off the tip of the ice berg. It provides you with an opportunity to see how real search engine reputation is measured.

Measuring and scoring sentiment is a time-consuming process. We have full-time people who do this for some of our clients. Many of our clients have full-time people who do this for their own companies. There is no tool, no matter how sophisticated, that can start out knowing what is helpful and what is hurtful in online conversations, although our most sophisticated tools do incorporate artificial intelligence to learn how the sentiment scoring works.

If you want to know what your real online reputation is like you have to go way beyond the simplistic “alert screen” motif. You have to look at the many contexts around what people are saying to you. Sometimes a negative comment is a good thing.

Sentiment can be measured across blogs, across forums, across search engines, across social media services. But the measurement itself can only be driven by what you believe to be helpful, hurtful, and irrelevant. You have to get a feel for how bad the message ABOUT you is before you can figure out what you need to put into your own message.

It doesn’t matter if Website X has 50 bajillion backlinks. That tells you nothing about whether the site is a friend, foe, or fair-weather advocate. Some sites will carry both favorable and unfavorable content about you.

Just knowing there are online conversations about you isn’t enough. You need to know if they are favorable, unfavorable, or mixed.

Just knowing there are Web sites mentioning your name in the search results isn’t enough. You need to know where they rank, what their sentiment is, and how large a search audience they may reach.

If a tool or service doesn’t help you understand sentiment, it’s doing nothing for your online reputation management. That is as true for search engine reputation management as for social media reputation management.

Yes, Virginia, you do need to broadcast your marketing message to all corners of the online world and make sure it’s heard everywhere. But when all that is said and done, you still need to know what other people are saying about you and whether that’s good or bad.

TruReputation Score lets you see very quickly with minimal effort just exactly how broad a reach the favorable and unfavorable content has in the major search engines. The tool tracks where the eyeballs go. Search results listings that are less likely to be clicked upon are given considerably less weight than search results listings that are most likely to be clicked upon.

When you’re evaluating your search reputation management you don’t need to know about every Web page that mentions your name — just the pages that are most likely to be seen in the search results and influence people’s opinions about you in some way. TruReputation Score is about the search sphere. We have other ways of tracking and measuring other spheres.

But at the end of the day the bottom line remains the same: without sentiment you cannot measure and manage your online reputation in any helpful capacity.

Related posts:

• TruReputation Launches from Best SEO Blog
• TruReputation from SEO Theory