Information Madness

Blogs and review sites are the way to express your opinions, views about a product or a company. Bloggers like me and you raise our voices, concerns about the experiences we had in the past so that if someone in the same situation can get the benifit.

Blogging has come a long way since it started back in 2003/2004. Search engines now a days like blogs better than the sites as blogs have better rankings then sites. So if you search for a particular company or product, you will end up getting blogs pointing out about the company reputation or product reviews etc. 

According to AFAQ, companies don't want to spend money to fix their problems and improve their reputation instead they want to hire the "Online Reputation Manager" who can fool the search engine by creating sites stuffed with keywords and product reviews that companies want to show to its customers.

So basically in a way these "Online Reputation Managers" wants to hide company's bad reputation and let people believe that everything is great about those companies and products. Comapnies that provide their "experienced advises" on online reputation management includes eBrandz, Communicate2, Value Pitch & Id18lab.

These reputation managers refere to Mouthshut and other review sites as "Cribbing sites". Here is what Communicate 2 Managing Director Vivek Bhargava said on how they improve someone's reputation online.

The first thing is to identify the source and if possible to pull the site down with the creator’s permission. If not, these companies create more content to confuse the search engine, so that the crazy blog doesn’t come up on the first page. But these are basic steps; the rest involves much more complicated, specialised work.

Do you call this ethical or unethical?