Negative Complaints that Keep Coming Back

If an attack is deliberate, rather than the result of an upset customer or employee, it is not unusual for the attacker to link to the false reports. This is precisely what happened to Elixir Interactive. The results would clean up and then an old report that had previously moved down in ranking would begin to move back up to the top results again.

Aggressive linking from the attacker was carried out with the intent to rank the complaints for branded searches.

Many of the links also came from duplicate articles that had been slightly rewritten and posted as blog posts and articles on various sites.  C learly no customer based in the US as they claimed to be would post a complaint then find dozens of bloggers many overseas to post the same content on and link to their complaint.  The idea that this detractor thinks they can make this activity look genuine is preposterous.

The attackers would post an article like the one below:

Then add links to the articles with one link to a complaint for our brand.

The content was republished after slightly changing the text.

Using Copyscape, Elixir was able to verify this article was replicated multiple times.

Taking a closer look, Elixir found that there were many spam links to these false complaints that were likely created by the original attacker. Accounts were created on social media sites that had no content and only a link to the negative post. These profiles would have nothing added before or after the date of creation and are clearly just profiles set up to link to the negative report.

In the above image you can see the signature is the text “elixir interactive” this links to a complaint on RipoffReport about Elixir Interactive.

There were also blog posts with linking that made absolutely no sense: three links would appear in a row linking to a reputation management company’s website, an Elixir Interactive false complaint and another company or review site.

These links would praise the other companies, so why would the other link be to a complaint?

Again it is beyond any common sense that the detractors think that it would not look unusual to create a blog post linking to the false complaint while at the same time linking to stellar reports on two of Elixir’s competitors.  In addtion to this they also claim Elixir are ” a superb reputation management company” while linking to a false a defamatory report about them.  It is possible that they may not understand Elixir’s 12 year history in SEO  and their knowledge of the Web and how to find and piece information together.  Good online Reputation Mangement  companies must be excellent internet researchers to do the job right they need to  know exactly what the challenge is and what they are dealing with. The same is true of course for good SEO’s and reputation management is just another form of SEO.

These links appear to have been created solely to push up the complaints in the search results. These deplorable practices maximize the damage of the false complaints.