JS: One of the things I thought was interesting is that you have a partnership with Bazaarvoice, is that correct?

Nick: Yes.

JS: Have they had to scrub much so far in terms of profanity or some of those other things or have they not really had to remove many reviews so far?

Nick: The amount of reviews that they are scrubbing hasn’t changed much since we’ve launched. I looked today and I think we’re at about 14% that are being kicked back. I’m actually pretty happy with that because it shows that yes, we are finding things that we don’t want and are rejecting them but it’s not been overwhelmingly so.

JS: I would imagine, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes, are you kind of learning as you go along with seeing the kickbacks and changing your stance on things and modifying what you want to see and what you don’t want to see or are you like, ‘here are our guidelines and here’s what we’re sticking with?’

Nick: We’ve definitely been tweaking some things and I think one of the big things we’ve seen, and Bazaarvoice has been great – they do a lot of fantastic moderation, but one of the things that we’ve seen is that the dealer business is so different from a lot of other industries that we have found that we have to tweak some things over time, but more along the lines of really understanding that here is the type of experience that would lead me, as a car buyer, to leave a review.

So, I think one of the best examples that I’ve seen is that on most review sites, when you’re reviewing a product – a physical product – you don’t want to include that I got something that would indicate that I got X number of dollars off the deal because you’re reviewing the store or the deal. And what we’ve been seeing is we get a pretty substantial number of reviews that call out specific things like that. It’s one of those gray areas that we’re taking a look and trying to figure out what makes the most sense in our world because for the most part I say that we probably all know someone who has gone to a dealership and got a fantastic deal and they immediately came back and said, ‘oh my gosh, you should shop at this store because they gave me $400 off’ or whatever it was. We want to make sure that we encourage people to leave those types of reviews while also not setting a certain expectation that it’s always going to be done this exact way for every person who comes into that store.

JS: Ruins their leverage to be able to do those types of things. Do you have a breakdown of what percentage have been kicked out for being spam, you know some evil person in my industry automated that’s trying to build links vs completely flaming vs….

Nick: I don’t have anything that I can quote off the top of my head but I do know that I’ve looked pretty closely and I really haven’t seen very much spam at this point mostly it’s about specific content rather than the same review being posted over and over again by the same person …that type of stuff.

JS: Do you have stuff in place to kick stuff out for dealers trying to game the system, not for negative reviews, but trying to get people to leave good, fake astroturf?

Nick: Absolutely. It’s the first thing that brought up when we talk to site users or the dealers. And it goes both ways. It’s this fear that:

1. How do you make sure that a dealer is not leaving a lot of negative reviews, followed by ‘How do I make sure that the dealer down the road isn’t coming in each morning and telling his salespeople that they’re going to leave five glowing reviews today just to build up our volume.’ So there are a couple different things that we do and you’ll see this when you look at the screen shot [see below], we do ask whenever someone leaves a review, the last question that we ask is a check a box to certify that they’re not employed by a dealership. I realize that’s not going to catch everyone, but we do want to make sure that right off the bat that we are asking the question to make sure that people understand that if you are a dealer, leaving a review, we are going to pay very, very close attention to it and you really shouldn’t be using it for that.

JS: Because you have a little bit of a hammer that you could bring down on someone for doing that.

Nick: Exactly. It gives us the ability to come back and say, ‘you know what, you certify that you weren’t a dealership, but your IP address indicates that you are so we’re going to do something with this.’

The other thing that we do is we require that each and every review goes through a validation process by the person who wrote it before we even look at it. The example that I use, is that if I’m at work and I’m bored and I am going to go write 20 bogus reviews, I’m going to get 20 different emails, and I have to open up each and every one and validate it and say yes, indeed I did write this and I did mean to send it. So, as a first step if we get 20 reviews, we do take a look at where the reviews are coming from so we do have some threshold there that will kick-off something that says, ‘you know what this is a little suspicious or we just don’t want this at all.’

JS: I can understand why you might not want to disclose any of this information, but can you talk about anything that you have in place to guard against astroturfing or false-flaming or anything like that?

Nick: What I can talk about is pretty standard from what I’ve heard in the industry is to pay very, very close attention to the IP address of any dealership. I know some folks who go to the trouble of specifically collecting the IP address of every dealership and for other folks who just pay attention to once a response is written, capture the IP address and then sort-of flag that for any reviews that come later on. So, we do similar stuff there because we do want to make sure we are paying very, very close attention to. Once we feel like something is coming from a dealership, we don’t other different types of content coming from someone who may have a biased viewpoint there.

JS: Have you had any feedback…one of the things that … and almost everyone deals with this because anyone who has reviews, like you said, some kind of IP check…something along those lines, but one of those throwing the baby out with the bathwater type of issues, at least from my perspective, is that it’s really convenient if a dealer can just leave up a computer and have the new car buyer talk about their experience, right there in the moment.

Nick: It’s one of the hardest things in the world and it comes up so often and it’s such a great idea, you know ‘I’m in the store, I’m buying a car, I’m sitting there waiting for the financing to go through (or whatever it is)’, and they say, ‘why don’t you go ahead and leave a review for me while you’re here.’ We would love to be able to do it, it’s just that the number one concern, from both site users and dealers was that we’re filtering out those false-positives. We’ve suggested some things and I had one dealer come up to me at NADA this year and he actually suggested that he was going to create an entirely separate network at his store to have a separate IP address just so people could still leave reviews, but they would always be replying on different machines. I thought that was interesting.

JS: But, would he be recycling the IP address?

Nick: No, so he was actually talking about setting up an entirely different network with a different IP address that he would be paying extra money to support; just to be able to capture those on site.

JS: But, you would still see that there would be multiple, multiple, multiple entries from the same IP address.

Nick: You would, and that’s the type of thing that would have to be worked out with the concept of ‘how can I really verify that they have this kiosk in the store.’ And that’s something that I called out to him and I think that’s it’s something that we could probably do if we have someone going to that extent to keep things pure, but initially it would flag something on our side and probably other places to say that the volume coming in from one location is abnormally high. That’s where you would look at voice, you look at dates they came in, you look at scores…things like that.

JS: Makes sense. This is one of the most fascinating areas so I really appreciate you giving some thoughts on that. We have kind of talked about the dealers’ fears….How do you compare yourselves to a Yelp or Google Places or something like that?

Nick: And I kind of make a distinction between those two because Google is such a aggregator of all of the content that’s out there; usually the question that I’ll get is comparing us to Dealer Rater is the big one that comes up. Usually what I tell folks is that our goal was not to set ourselves up as a competitor to any of those sites. Typically when I talk to a dealer I tell them ‘the more places you have positive reviews out there, the better off you’re going to be.’ Because then, wherever people go, because we know people love Yelp, so all the more reason to have positive reviews there. The more places you have reviews, the more likely you are to catch all those various users across sites and see ‘yes, I’m going to have a positive experience at this store.’

I think this is one of the things that I strongly believe you want the content across as many places as possible and that’s when you start playing into Google, as they aggregate from every where, so once they see that there are enough reviews out there, all of a sudden on your Places page, you have a great amount of content, coming all across the Internet. All the more reason for who sees you on Google, says ‘you know what, I am ready to work with this store.’

Going further, I actually do suggest to folks who say ‘why should I be driving volume to Cars.com, rather than Yelp or Google or to Dealer Rater or wherever.’ I tell them, ‘you know, if you’re driving volume to three places just make us the fourth one.’ Again, it’s a win because they have more content out there. But I am not in any way trying to tell them that they should drive traffic to Cars.com because we have found that when people find the sites they like that’s the site they want to leave review content on. And that’s not a bad thing, whatsoever.

Really though, what we look at is, the story I always tell is one of our affiliate sales managers here told me back in December that she was shopping for a car, and she obviously went to Cars.com, she found the exact type of car she wanted. She then narrowed it down, she found the specific vehicle she wanted and she found the dealership where she thought she wanted to shop at, and then she left our site to go do additional research about that dealership. So, I just look at it as the more ways you can integrate that fantastic review content, where people are already digesting other information, the better off you’re going to be. And that’s really the whole reason we started getting into this. I say that the more places there are reviews out there, the better it is for everyone …. It’s just a huge win.

JS: Along those lines, do you have any agreements or discussions with Google Places, with Yahoo! Local, with bing Local, any of those places to use your material?

Nick: We have. I think what you’ll find with most of those places is that they all have their secret sauce and their own way of doing things, but typically the understanding is that you have to build up a certain amount of volume to be viewed as a credible source on this type of content, so we know that once we hit that it will be a lot easier to be aggregated, but our goal is certainly that once we have the volume we will make whatever site tweaks that we need to in order to be included in the aggregation.

JS: So, you definitely want to be included in the aggregation.

Nick: Absolutely. If it gets the content out there, it adds to the SEO value, so we definitely want that out there.

JS: Is there anything else you’d like to add as we wrap up the end of this?

Nick: The more places that content is our there, the better. We are certainly trying to encourage our dealers to view this as it’s an opportunity to really take control of what’s being said about you out there, so we’ve gone to the lengths of trying to provide them with various materials they can use in-store to drive volume. And again, I typically say, ‘if you’re already doing something, if you have banners for a different location, that’s fine. Just add us to the mix, one way or another. But you are driving the volume.’

I really look at it from a dealer perspective and one of the stories I heard from one of the dealers is that they’re viewing reputation management and reviews as a lead generator. So, what they do is look at it and track the number of phone calls they get, specifically from reviews, and they pay attention to the facts of how much more money can they make based on the fact that they have this great reputation that’s out there in the field. So, I’m just trying to convince people and say that this is a really good thing, assuming you really take advantage of it and you really start playing up your positive reputation, the better off it’s going to be for you.

JS: It’s interesting and we deal a lot of times with the opposite of it, where it’s not the wanting to get more leads (of course, they always want to), but when they look at online reviews and reputation management, at least in the beginning, it’s a question of ‘how can they stop any loss or perceived loss’ that is out there because they don’t have enough reviews or if there are some negative reviews out there. So, it’s really interesting to hear the flip-side of that, as well.

Nick: What we really have tried to talk to folks about, and we really have heard this over and over again, as we did our own market research…consumers kept telling us ‘you know, one negative review really isn’t the worst thing in the world and in a lot of cases it’s actually a positive. As when consumers see a lot of reviews that are all five stars as compared to similar scores that are 4.7, 4.8; that 4.7 has a lot more credibility because site users and digesters of information get the fact that every experience is not perfect and sooner or later, someone is going to have a bad day and it’s going to come off ‘not-perfect’.

So, when you do have some of those real-life experiences it’s actually a good thing. I also do try to convince people, when I do talk to them, that when you do get that person who did have a poor experience, it’s a great, great opportunity to leave the response indicating that they want to take personal responsibility for what happened, that it’s an aberration, that’s it’s not typically how you do business and you want to make sure that it goes right. Because all of a sudden, you’ve driven home to the people who come later on, that that’s not how you do business and that you really do care about each individual consumer.

So, yeah, we get it a lot, the first question of ‘what happens when I get a negative review,’ but we really do try to get people to understand that one negative review isn’t the worst thing in the world, and second there are all kind of ways for you to drive volume of positive reviews and the sooner that a dealer starts taking advantage of that and the sooner they start making it part of their process, the better off they’re going to be.

JS: My old boss used to say ‘You have two chances to meet someone….The first time you meet them and the first time you screw up.’ So along those lines, I’m a dealer and someone has just left a negative review. What mechanisms are in place to respond? Do I get to respond privately or only publicly, or am I able to respond to them at all? What are my recourses there?

Nick: This was one of the things that we debated most hotly before the launch; and so what we settled on was that anytime a review is posted the dealership always gets an opportunity to respond to it whether it’s positive or critical. And after they respond we close out the conversation. That was based on a large part on some of the feedback we heard from dealers that don’t do a lot in this space today. They were a little nervous about how much more process we’re going to build into this. So we didn’t want to get into the process of building a whole back and forth public exchange. I also think, anecdotely, I saw a decent amount of situations where that public back and forth just didn’t turn out terribly well. I think it’s just far easier, when you’re having that continued conversation, that you’re just going to regret one way or another.

The one thing that we’re keeping a very close eye on is the concept of allowing a private response before something gets posted. And originally, the way we landed is that we shied away from that because we really wanted the focus to be about your online reputation, less about a way to resolve customer service disputes. I think there’s a great amount of value in that and to be fair it’s kind of the norm in the industry right now. What we were really looking at is that we really have a substantial number of dealerships that don’t do this today and were very, very loud about the fact that they don’t want this proceeds to be complicated so we wanted it to be as simple as possible. That being said, we’re keeping a very, very close eye on the type of feedback that we get because we really need to make sure that if this is something we need to do, that we’re paying attention to it.

JS: Do you have any sort of automated notification system for the dealers if someone leaves a review or is it on them to check it themselves and monitor it daily?

Nick: We have a backend tool for dealers that we call My Dealer Center. And anytime a review is posted on Cars.com, meaning anytime it’s been through validation, moderation and it’s been approved, once it’s posted, the dealer automatically gets an email that says ‘You got a review posted on Cars.com. Please login by clicking this link and write a response to it’. We do make sure that we notify them, whether it’s a positive review or a critical one, we do notify them that it’s there and we do try to encourage them to reply to every single review not just to the ones that may be a review on a experience that was less than ideal.

JS: To me, I see a lot of fear from business owners about that….that it’s just going to be out there and they’re not going to know about it.

Nick: We definitely wanted to avoid that. I think it’s just one of those things that we saw as we got into this that there are places that have been aggregating for a long time and dealers just didn’t know what was there. So, we wanted to make sure that we are doing everything we can to warn them right off the bat.

I’d just like to publicly thank Nick and Cars.com for all their time and transparency regarding their dealer rating and review process.  If you’re shopping for a car, check them out.  Or if you’re a dealer, make sure you sign up for the My Dealer Center and start accepting reviews now!

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Nick was extremely gracious with his time.  There’s so much good stuff that we’re breaking it up into two parts.  The second half of the interview will be posted Friday.

JS: Before we get started, is there anything in particular you want to say in particular about the review program?

Nick: The stance we continue to take and the whole reason that I’ll say we got into this is that we heard loud and clear from both our site users and dealers that there was just a crazy amount of demand in the marketplace for this type of content. The last six months that I’ve been talked to everyone under the sun about this, every month or two there’s a new stat coming out where the bar just keeps getting raised higher and higher where consumers are just aching to consume this content generated from other consumers. So the way we looked at it as if we started to collect this type of information and get it on our site and get the consumer the type of information they need, but it also helps our dealers by present their story right then and there. We looked at it as a win for our consumers, our dealers, and cars.com.

JS: I just can’t believe how many changes there have been with the review process in general over the last 6-8 months. It’s just been insane.

Nick: It has blown up. It is the hot button at this point. Everyone is talking about how can I start using reviews to start generating sales, how can I manage my reputation online, more and more we’re just hearing it everywhere. We’re just happy to do what we can to advance the conversation.

JS: Right now, your dealer review process is still in the opt-in phase for dealers, correct?

Nick: Correct. We’re opt in until mid- to late-summer. And then at that point, we’ll enable the functionality for every single dealer on cars.com.

JS: So you don’t have a set date yet for the hard move over?

Nick: We do have an internal one, trying to avoid really talking about it publicly until I am completely set that there isn’t not going to be any last minute change. I feel pretty good about it but more just because we are talking about it being beta, we just want to make sure that something else just doesn’t pop up. I feel very very confident that it’ll be over the summer.

JS: Ok, so mid to late, but you all have your own target date?

Nick: Yes, I feel pretty good about, it’s more that dates have tendency to change but don’t want to talk publicly then we decide we need to play with the functionality and then it gets pushed back a little bit. But for the moment we’re still paying close attention to the feedback we’ve been getting.

JS: How many dealers have signed up so far? [Editor's note: this interview was actually conducted April 29, 2011, so adjust dealer opt-ins accordingly.]

Nick: We actually have… over 6700 yesterday.  Let me get an up to the minute count for you….

JS: While you’re waiting on that, have you noticed any distinguishing characteristics for the dealers that are signing up….large, small, certain pockets from the country, anything able to grasp from that so far?

Nick: Originally some region localization, and we’re still definitely seeing that.  What surprised me is the adoption in our smaller markets, so you typically expect to see in large, metro markets more opportunities, more sales folks localized, but we’ve seen some really, really good adoption in some of the areas you would see as more rural. It’s hard to say that there’s a specific type of dealer because it’s been really been pretty consistent. Most folks saying yes, we’re interested.

JS: Do you see something where one or two dealers will opt in then competitors in the surrounding area are seeing that and moving towards it as well?

Nick: I’m expecting we’ll start to see it as the review volume continues to grow, so one of the things we have talked to people about is this is a great time to get in initially and start building the volume. I think the bigger draw is not necessarily people having the ‘Review-Me’ functionality on Cars.com; the bigger draw is when I’m a dealership and I have those five gold stars next to my name, then it’s a little extra incentive for the guy down the road to say, ‘You know what, I want to be a part of this too.’

Just so I don’t forget to give it to you, we are just shy of 7,000 dealers now. We’re seeing about 100 a day.

JS: How many dealers are there total across the US?

Nick: In our side of things ballpark of about 17,000

JS: I can see why they would want it, but it just seems like it’s moving really quickly with them voluntarily knowing about it and voluntarily opting-in.

Nick: I think one of the big things that really surprised me was that I came into this with the same expectations as a lot of folks though ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to be a really scary thing and are our dealers going to be excited about it?’ We did some really interesting focus groups with both site users and dealers back in 2010 and I remember my second day into the project and I was just floored by the amount of positive feedback that dealers were putting out there. And it was really along the lines of them saying, ‘one way or another I do something with reputation today.’

And, so all of them were talking about their CSI scores, most of them would bring up something about the Better Business Bureau … one of the insane things that really surprised me because you just don’t think about it is even the smaller, independent dealers were very quick to say that they have probably sold a car online at some auction site at some point or another, and on all those sites you leave feedback for someone. So most of them were already doing it in some form or another and pretty much all of them said whether they were doing it today, they realized that this was the landscape and it’s going to happen sooner or later. So, I think the dealer reaction overall was surprising at the beginning, but now it’s everywhere so more and more folks are getting involved in it.

JS: Has the feedback changed or what kind of feedback are you getting now from the dealers after they have opted-in?

Nick: It hasn’t changed too much. I mean, dealers are pretty good about offering us some suggestions, and some tweaks, but nothing that has been hugely surprising just yet. The big thing I’ve been seeing, thus far, is that there’s a feeling out there among some that reputation management is a combination of both a resolution of customer service issues and also this idea that I’m going to build up my brand and my reputation in various places. So, that’s one area we’ve seen is a lot of requests and or suggestions, but overall we’re still just seeing dealers are opting-in, they’re starting to get on board, they’re starting to do more to drive volume and it really hasn’t changed too much from when we first launched to where we are today.

JS: Thank you. That’s really interesting. We’re seeing that with our clients we do reputation management with where it’s a little bit of, ‘Oh, shoot, we have to look at some our own internal policies and how we’re handling things in addition to how are we cleaning up outward facing as well.’

Nick: And that’s something that I’ve heard from a pretty substantial number of folks; this idea of ‘you know, I like the idea, but before we opt-in, give us some time to really nail down our process.’ Which I think is a fantastic thing. Whenever that comes up, I tell the dealer to ‘take your time, figure this out.’ It makes perfect sense.

I would rather you come in ready to go, feeling like you have your process nailed down then you feel like you have to figure it out overtime. So, we’ve seen a decent amount of that and I love the fact that more and more dealers are realizing that reputation management is a very important part of their daily process and they’re going to figure out a way to make that work.

JS: Well said. What kind of visit adoption have you seen so far?

Nick: Visitor adoption has been pretty much how we expected. The interesting thing, the dilemma, we’ve faced from a user experience perspective is that we feel really good about the fact that we’re likely going to cross 7,000 dealers opted in today or Monday, but on the flip side it’s still not a majority of our dealerships. The difficulty then is; how do you present it to a user who wants to find a specific dealership that may or may not already be opted-in, and if they are opted-in they may or may not have the review volume just yet.

What we have seen though, when we launched we were getting a certain number of reviews a day, and I just looked this morning and saw that the average number of reviews coming in has more than doubled. We’re seeing that adoption pick-up pretty quickly, but it’s still one of those things that we’re trying to make sure we’re presenting the best user experience possible so we’re not saying ‘come read reviews’ and then they can’t read those reviews. We’re keeping close eyes on it and it’s going in the direction we want it to, but it’s one of those things that I expect we will be able to talk a little bit more intelligently about it once we have every single dealer live on the site.

JS: So, if the dealer is opted-in and the consumer is looking at one of their cars, is it going to be right on that page where they can leave the review?

This Mike Erdman Toyota (Merritt Island, FL) page shows how dealer ratings and reviews look within Cars.com

Editor’s note: here are some links for cars.com review samples that Nick sent over after the interview:

• Dealer Locator Search showing Ratings
• Dealer Specific Page showing Ratings & Reviews
• Dealer Specific Page for Rating & Reviewing
• Vehicle Specific Page with Reviews

Nick: There are two main places where the content kind-of lives today. Right now when you come to Cars.com, in essence there are different ways that you can search but it boils down to I can choose to search for a specific dealership or I can choose to search for a specific car. Anywhere that you’re searching for a specific dealership, where we’re presenting dealership information, we have a column right there in our dealer locator functionality that shows the current rating. And then underneath it is the link to click here and read all the reviews and next to it is click here to write a review. We’re trying to separate those pages out just so our dealers can take advantage that and funnel people to the appropriate page.

The other place that you’ll see similar functionality is on each individual vehicle page. Again, the idea being we want to present their score right there in the context of the vehicle so it gives the user all the confidence in the world to say, yes I do want to work with this dealership. We don’t necessarily want to force all that content into that page though because we want to keep the focus on the vehicle information. Very, very similar, they can click on the link there that takes them to the dealer specific review page where they can read all the reviews and right at the top of that page is a big purple button that lets them write a review if that’s why they’re on that page.

JS: I’m looking at this, and I don’t know if I just missed it before or you just put it up recently, but that review a dealer link on the homepage, has the green beta tag on it; I’m just curious if you have looked at the analytics and if you know like are people going through there to rate dealers or are they more likely to do that after they have looked at a car. Do you have any stats on that?

Nick: Off the top of my head, my impression is that they are going through the link on the homepage, although we are getting a lot of traffic on the dealer specific pages. One of the stances that we’ve taken is that we want to do everything to empower our dealers to drive the volume as best as possible, so each dealer has a specific URL to their store where they can send out emails or do whatever they want with it. They can tell people ‘if you want to leave a review for me click here and go directly to this page.’ We are getting a substantial amount of traffic that bypasses the homepage and goes directly to there.

What we’ve seen though, in terms of the vehicle page compared to the homepage is the people who write reviews are not necessarily looking for a car right now or they’re not drilling down and find a specific vehicle, and then realizing that I’ve shopped at this dealership and I want to leave a response. More so, they are coming in, they’re reading reviews and lots of times the folks that read reviews then actually want to write reviews as well.

We’ll add a link to Part 2 here when the rest of the interview gets posted.  The second half of the interview goes into great detail about astroturfing; review scrubbing; how they view themselves in the greater review landscape compared to places like Yelp, Google Places, and Dealer Rater; and how dealers can respond to criticism.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

Based on the jury’s verdict, Judge Margaret B. Seymour of the United States District Court for South Carolina, entered judgment today against Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) and web-hosting firm Bright Builders Inc. on counts for contributory trademark infringement and unfair trade practices for assisting with the construction and hosting of the web site www.copycatclubs.com (“Copycat”), an online business that sold counterfeit [Roger Cleveland Golf Company] golf clubs. The judgment included an award of $770,750 in statutory damages against Bright Builders and $28, 250 in statutory damages against Christopher Prince who owned the web site.

This represents the first time that an SEO/Web Host or other Internet Intermediary was found liable for contributory infringement without having first received actual notification of the counterfeit sales from a third party. The case was presented and pursued by Cleveland Golf/Srixon based on a theory that Bright Builders knew or should have known of the infringing conduct based on the name of the website, the content of the website, and certain discussions Bright Builders had with Prince regarding his web site. The jury accepted this theory finding Bright Builders was liable for contributory trademark infringement of eleven of Cleveland Golf’s registered trademarks.

“For Internet Intermediaries like SEOs and web hosts, this should be a cautionary warning,” says Christopher Finnerty, a partner at Nelson Mullins Law Firm in Boston who represented Cleveland Golf/Srixon. “The jury found that web hosts and SEO’s cannot rely solely on third parties to police their web sites and provide actual notice of counterfeit sales from the brand owners.”

Let’s rewind there for a second.  The company that owned the site was hit for $28,250.  The SEO (and Web developer / host – I think this role was significant in the ruling) got a grand piano dropped on their heads for more than 27 times that amount.  While I didn’t see the contract, don’t know how long they performed SEO services for Prince, or if there were performance incentives, I have to think this judgment dwarfs what Bright Builders ever made on this contract.

Normally I write about search engine marketing and social media for end users, but this case is probably more interesting to providers of SEO services like us.  So, if you’re not that, you probably don’t want to read further on for analysis, unless you’re a Law & Order type of person.

What this Ruling Means Legally for SEOs

On the face of it, this ruling didn’t seem to make much sense – at least in terms of how the damages were split.  Therefore I reached out to good friend and practicing attorney Chris Gardill of Phillips, Gardill, Kaiser & Altmeyer, PLLC.  Chris will be the first to tell you he is neither an IP attorney nor a litigator, but he’s very much a technophile with a great understanding of social media and way more SEO-related knowledge than 99+% of bar passers*.

* Why does no one call barred attorneys that? That’s a pretty awesome description.

Here are Chris’ notes, which he was kind enough to share and allow me to reproduce on the Found blog.  If you’d like to read more of his thoughts on the law, all things Apple, and WVU athletics, follow him on twitter.  Note the last several paragraphs for free basic advice on ways SEOs can protect themselves in similar cases, although I’ll echo the common disclaimer that you should consult your own attorney on all contract matters.

Justin,

I have gotten a chance to review the docket of the case you found the write-up on that recently resulted in a jury verdict against the SEO/web host and in favor of Cleveland Golf from the District Court’s electronic filing system. I have also attached the Court’s order denying the SEO’s Motion for Summary Judgment that provides additional clarity to the case, particularly in the areas of the attached document that are highlighted.

The first observation that I would have is that you were reading Nelson Mullins’ press release on the case, so the ultimate ramifications of this case “could” be a bit overstated as there are clearly some marketing aspects in the “article” from them. The second, which is something that is discussed endlessly in law school settings, is that bad facts make for bad law. As you’ll see, this seems to be a very egregious set of facts that may unfortunately have far-reaching implications to more legitimate endeavors elsewhere, and it’s a problem that we who work in the legal system deal with regularly. The third is that, regardless of how blind justice is supposed to be, choosing your attorney wisely CAN absolutely make a difference.

With regard to the third observation (yes, I’m going out of order), Cleveland Golf was represented by at least 4 different partners at 2 different offices of Nelson Mullins (a national law firm with hundreds of attorneys and a sub-specialty in IP law) along with local counsel in the case. To say they came to play and dedicated some resources to pursuing this case is an understatement. I can only assume this sort of thing would be a bad problem to such manufacturers, though, so I can understand from that aspect why they pursued it the way they did. Although the lawyer representing the SEO might be just fine, it appears that he (because there was only 1) was at least out of their league. You’ll see that the SEO’s lawyers did attempt to get the case dismissed pretrial with a motion for summary judgment (that led to the court’s ruling that I’ve attached), but it was a poor effort (1.5 page motion) that did not conform to either the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure or the Local Rules of the Court and apparently did not contain any sort of coherent legal argument. Because every court’s rules are basically designed (at least in theory) to not allow an opposing party to escape substantive culpability on mere technicalities, you really have to be pretty bad (or simply not care what you’re writing) to put together pleadings that plainly violate the rules. I will say that you cannot possibly file a summary judgment motion in federal court, though, and have it contain all of the requisite pieces under the applicable rules in a page and a half. Since the SEO’s lawyer got pummeled so badly at the pretrial stage, it’s also safe to assume that Cleveland Golf’s lawyers might have also done a better job convincing the jury of their client’s case, too.

On the first issue, you’ll see that the website that seemed to cause the biggest issue was one that was set up using the domain name copycatclubs.com that boasted on the front page and in the metadata that had been inserted into the site, for SEM purposes I presume, information relating to the site being a place to acquire both original and “copied” golf equipment. That, along with other facts in this case that are mentioned in the Court’s order, made it clear that all of those involved should have been pretty openly aware that the owner was selling counterfeit items. There was also a good deal of information relating to how intertwined the SEO was in setting up the site and also organizing and branding the business that they could not have “not known” that the material they were dealing with might have been problematic on a number of levels. I don’t know this for a fact, but I assume many of your clients who sell goods on an e-commerce site might be similar in that they do not have retail locations, so their website is where all of their business originates from. Because of that, I’m sure the degree that the SEO/web host was involved in the setup of the business and the structure of the site is quite extensive and situations like this are not all that uncommon despite how that issue might be portrayed in the court’s order. However, because of the facts present and the nature of what they were dealing with, it seems pretty plain that all involved knew, or with any amount of common sense, “should have known,” that what they were doing was wrong or improper in some way. In other words, what was going on here was a pretty blatant set of facts and the SEO/web host was in a position that they should have known what they were doing was wrong.

That leads to the problem that I mentioned about bad facts making bad law. Yes, this was a pretty bad set of circumstances and, looking at the situation objectively, I understand how the jury could have found the SEO liable like they did. Does it mean, like the partner from Nelson Mullins says in the release, that all SEOs now have some affirmative duty to be proactive and perform due diligence on behalf of their client or risk being found liable for infringement for things that they assist with posting or somehow enhancing search results on them? Unfortunately for your company, maybe, but I’d like to think not under a better set of facts. I think it would be logical, for example, where an SEO or a web hosting company just steps in to meet with a client about developing a website or some kind of SEO work, provides ideas and is provided with some artwork and content (particularly if the site owner in an e-commerce context later adds the actual content or goods for sale independently of the SEO/host), that there is a compelling argument to be made that the SEO should not be liable. Unfortunately, until this issue is fleshed out in other courts (and, particularly, appellate courts), it is just an argument and it will take further court cases or, for example, legislative changes to our patent and trademark system in the country, to achieve more certainty.

There are probably some learning points to take away from this case, though. The biggest one is probably to examine the contract or engagement letter the SEO uses when they are engaged to perform work for a client, and determine if the agreement contains any information relating to the intellectual property the SEO is being asked to work with or provided by the client. In light of this case, in an ideal set of circumstances, the agreement should contain representations that the client warrants to the SEO that it has the appropriate licenses, intellectual property rights or whatever else to have a right to use whatever the SEO is being asked to post to a site or somehow promote or manage for search/ad purposes. Such a contract provision should also have the client providing an indemnity to the SEO for any infringement claims, so that the client is required to indemnify/hold harmless/defend the SEO with regard to any claims that might be made by a third party at a later time like what happened here. Taking some basic steps like examining what the SEO’s contract says, as well as exercising even a bit of common sense judgment when meeting with a client or during the engagement to make sure what the SEO is being asked to do is not somehow blatantly illegal, will serve the SEO well later if a problem were to develop.

I hope some of this commentary helps you with the situation. With the caveat that I gave you earlier, you can feel free to use it or post about it like you discussed before if you think it would be helpful to others. Obviously, if you have any questions about what I’ve written or other aspects you’d like to talk about, don’t hesitate to ask.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

There are many SEO opportunities during the holidays. Taking advantage of them not only increases holiday traffic and sales, but can benefit an ecommerce store year round.

When you have a short time period, lets face it, Christmas is in less than a month, picking the correct SEO targets is essential to being successful…

#1 Use Google insight to find products trending upwards

Google Insight provides the search volume for any keyword that you enter. You can filter the results by type of search, location, time period or even a category. I recommend that you compare multiple keywords at once. Here are some search trends for graco, combi and bugaboo strollers:

Google Insight provides a projection for how many searches Google expects over the next few months if there is enough search data. Focus your holiday SEO efforts on those keywords that tend to trend upwards at the end of the year or are trending upwards steadily over time. Popular searches related to a specific product indicate that traffic should convert well.

#2 Find low hanging fruit

How many pages do you have on the second or third page of Google? It may be more than you think. I recently found 1,200 search terms for which a small website was ranking on the second or third page. By restructuring some of the site’s navigation and some simple link building, their traffic doubled within a month.

You can start digging by using a service like SEMrush to see what pages they have identified on the second or third pages of Google.

To get an extensive list, export all the keyword phrases that sent you traffic over the last 12 months. Once you have the list, run ranking reports on those keywords. Compile the data into a spreadsheet and filter out all keywords except for those that rank between 11 and 30.

#3 Get some quick links

Once you have a list of keywords on the second page of Google, its time to focus your SEO on those pages. One way to do that is to get some quick links from a couple of places that allow you to link to pages deep inside of your site.

Aboutus.org is a free authoritative site that simply wants you to put together a nice looking page about your website. With 299,000 inbound links, it carries some major authority.

Once you have your page fixed up, go here and ask them to remove the nofollow attribute from the links. If they do not approve your submission they are very helpful and will walk you through their standards. Make sure you link to your top five or ten products sitting on the second page of the SERPS.

Directory journal and ally web directory both allow deep links and seem to pass good link authority. Both are reasonably priced.

#4 Get your products reviewed

Find bloggers in your niche and send them a free product in hopes that they will give it a favorable review. This works best if you do not ask for many specifics, such as a link, just let the blogger do what he or she does naturally.

Blogs with strong RSS readership, big twitter accounts or a solid reputation at Digg are best because even if the main blogger gives you a nofollow link, you should get traffic and links from his or her readers. When someone popular mentions your site, your site will get mentioned again.

#5 Give something away

People love free stuff. A cool little gift for all orders over $30 should inspire conversions as well as garner inbound links. You can list your site at thefreesite.com with a link detailing your offer.

Having a holiday contest or giveaway is also a great way to buld link authority. Perhaps, give away a prize worth $100 for the best “Christmas morning photo” or “most extreme Christmas decorations”.

The bigger the prize the more attention and links you will garner. Make sure to link to some product pages from your holiday contest page to pass on the link authority built.

#6 Create holiday coupon codes

Can you offer your customers a 15% discount? If you can, contact several coupon websites and offer them unique 10% coupons. If one of the 10% discount coupons are used, share 5% of the sale with the coupon site.

If you can’t afford a 15% site wide discount, think about coupon codes for specific items. Even though you might not make money on that sale, you can present related products to make a profit.

I bought a printer on black Friday below retail, I then spent an insane amount of money on USB cords and a print server. The store still made their profit. But even if you don’t, the links themselves would be worth it.

#7 Sale holiday gift certificates

This works much like the coupons, except you contact online stores that sale gift certificates. Work out a deal to compensate them for their sales. Keep in mind, even if they never sale a gift certificate to your store, they will be linking to you and passing link authority.

You could also approach other store owners who sale products related to your site, but are not in direct competition. Ask them to sale your gift certificates and link to your site.

#8 Update your meta description

I pay attention to radio ads, television commercials and other forms of advertising to see how big manufacturers or retailers are advertising a specific product. I then rewrite the meta description tag to reflect this point of view. It creates familiarity and can increase click through rates.

#9 Create home page lists

The home page is usually the most authoritative page of the site. Research has shown that the further away a page is from the home page, the less domain authority and trust is given that page. Linking to product pages from the home page increases their authority, trust and PageRank. Here a few ideas for product lists on the home page:

• The best gifts under $30
• Our best holiday sellers
• His or her gift wish lists

About Jason Capshaw

Jason Capshaw is an Atlanta-based SEO consultant and the owner of MyWebTronics.  His primary focus centers around ecommerce SEO.

About The Marketing Experts Series

The above post is part of an occasional series of guest posts by various marketing experts.  Through it we hope to expand our community’s understanding of a variety of marketing techniques and strategies to improve their own online (and offline) marketing efforts.  If you are interested in writing for The Marketing Experts series, let us know.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?

DazzlinDonna as she is better known on the internets has been involved in this industry for quite some time and really knows her stuff.  I am personally delighted to have Donna kick off our The Marketing Experts series and now present her post on a very specific way you can improve your own search engine optimization efforts (or stay on top of your SEO firm).  — Justin

Over two years ago, way back in September, 2006, Google let us know that they were changing the way they display cache dates for our pages.  Specifically, Vanessa Fox said:

We’ve recently changed the date we show for the cached page to reflect when Googlebot last accessed it (whether the page had changed or not). This should make it easier for you to determine the most recent date Googlebot visited the page.

This was good to know because SEOs had already noticed that Google crawling patterns could indicate a sort of “crawling sandbox” and were soon realizing that cache dates were the new PageRank.  Aaron Wall summed it up by saying “What Google frequently visits (and spends significant resources to keep updated) is what they consider important.”

What is important is not just when Google last crawled a web page, but how often it returns to re-cache the page.  This crawl frequency is an excellent indicator of the importance of a page.  A good way to determine which pages will likely struggle to rank well is to see how often Google recaches each page.  Unfortunately, there aren’t any really easy methods of tracking the crawl frequency, especially across many pages of a large website.

Michael Gray recently outlined his method of crawl tracking in his post, How To Figure Out What Parts Of Your Website Aren’t Being Crawled.  This method involves uniquely date stamping every page and then querying search engines over time to see which pages haven’t been cached using that date phrase.  It’s not a bad method, and frankly I don’t have a better one.  I’ve always used the more manual process of noting the cache date of each page from a cache: query in a spreadsheet, and then tracking the query daily for a period of one month.  This only works well for a limited number of pages of course, since this type of manual checking takes time.

There is a WordPress crawl rate tracker plugin for WordPress blogs, and a couple of so-so paid tools for tracking crawl rates available, but I’ve never found the perfect “works for all sites and does it all for free” tool.  For that reason, I always concentrate on tracking just a few pages that are most important to me.  If there are some pages that I’m most concerned with ranking well, I’ll track their cache dates until I’ve determined the “cache-importance” of the page (which usually takes just a month or so).  If a page has been deemed fairly unimportant by Google, based on a very slow cache/crawl rate, then I know it’s time to focus more attention on updating the page and marketing it better.  If the page is being crawled frequently, I’ll focus my attention elsewhere for now.

If you want to spend more time on analyzing the bots that come around, your best bet is to look to your log files for more information. Javascript-based web analytics programs such as Google Analytics won’t help with this analysis, as spiders don’t run javascript, so those types of analytics programs will never be able to track spiders’ crawls.  Use those types of analytics programs strictly for human visitor analysis, as they are great for giving you a more realistic view of actual user visitors.  You’ll need log file analyzers that create reports from your actual web server log files in order to track the crawl patterns of spiders.  Ideally, you want to know when a spider comes to a page, the path it takes through your site, and how often it comes back to each page.  Most log file analysis programs can handle this task to some degree.  This kind of detailed information can give you even more insight into which pages are considered to be the most important – and which need more work.

In summary, the more often your page is crawled and cached by Google’s spiders, the more important that page is in Google’s eyes.  The more important the page is, the more likely it is to show up in Google’s search results for related queries.  If the page isn’t being crawled and cached very often, you should focus more efforts on keeping the page updated with useful content, and spend more time promoting the page.

About Donna Fontenot

Donna Fontenot, aka DazzlinDonna, is an Internet Entrepreneur and SEO, who has long utilized search engine optimization and affiliate marketing to create a successful online business.  Her goal as an ebusiness coach is to help others make a living online from the comfort of their homes (and in their pajamas).  Her motto is “You’ll never shine if you don’t glow.”

About The Marketing Experts Series

The above post is part of an occasional series of guest posts by various marketing experts.  Through it we hope to expand our community’s understanding of a variety of marketing techniques and strategies to improve their own online (and offline) marketing efforts.  If you are interested in writing for The Marketing Experts series, let us know.

Justin Seibert

Justin Seibert is the President of Direct Online Marketing. He regularly speaks on search engine marketing, social media optimization, and online reputation management. Follow him on twitter. Why not check out the company on facebook while you're at it?