Search Engine Reputation Management
Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) is one of the hottest areas of growth within the broad field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The purpose of SERM is to ensure that when a random searcher looks for data about a person, product, or company — they find only positive results.
This can involve the use of legal challenges or blackhat methods to remove negative results from the SERPS, but more often it involves ranking a large number of URL’s on the first few pages of the search results.
Think about that for a moment. To “win” at SERM, you have to control the first few pages of search results for a keyword. Compare that to SEO, where we normally content ourselves with gaining one good spot in the SERPS.
SERM is often accomplished by building hosted pages on authoritative domains like Squidoo and Hubpages, because pages on those domains are easier to get to page one of the SERPS. The hosted pages are built and promoted, until all of the “negative” search results are crowded out of the first few pages of search results.
Ashwin Ramesh, founder of OrganicApex and one of the leaders in the Search Engine Reputation Management field, believes that we have only just seen the tip of the iceberg with SERM and that spending on SERM will increase more than fifty times it’s current level in the next five years.
What do you think?