The “Real” Devin Downey

Why don't you just hold a gun to my head?

For the last couple of years I’ve monitored my name via Google alerts as part of this experiment of achieving and maintaining search engine rankings for my name. This morning, before I could get through my green tea, I found that my rankings are under attack. Now ranking number nine in Google for “Devin Downey”, is this page from a company called Juglo.com. What’s their pitch? If they were asking for money, you could describe the basis as blackmail. Essentially, register with us or we will continue to post this search engine optimized bio of you until you buy it and write or someone else does.

Here’s the setup, the heading states, “Want to Know Everything About Devin Downey?” and the text on the page provides a fictional bio of “Devin Downey”. At the bottom it asks, “Are you Devin Downey?”, and goes onto the sales pitch:

This profile was autogenerated by Juglo and optimized to rank at the very top within search engines for the phrase “Devin Downey”. If you are Devin Downey you can now sign up and claim this profile as yours.

A premium search engine position for this profile means anybody looking for your name in Google™, Yahoo™ or Live Search™ will find the information YOU want them to see. Join the Juglo community and promote your name online.

The unstated message is essentially, if you don’t register for this profile with us, someone else may very well do so and write things about you that are much more concerning than our “example” bio. After years and years of seeing this done on the corporate level, I guess it was only a matter of time before a company used a blatant strategy like this one to do the same at the private citizen level. To me, it seems not altogether different then when people have created profiles on Myspace and Facebook of famous people and built up huge lists of friends and then attempted to sell the profile to the celebrity’s management team. The major difference is that they are not asking for money (at least for now) but rather they have the opportunity to utilize your registration information. In their privacy statment they state, “I agree that Juglo uses the information that I enter in the Juglo user panel (such as gender and attended college, profession, etc.) and that I voluntarily display on my own profile, to send me personalized targeted advertising and / or special offers and services via the Juglo network.”

Something about all this just seems unsavory. Still, it’s not all that different than Naymz, Zoom Info or Classmates.com, other than in the approach. While those companies rely on information harvested from existing files on the internet or consumer supplied content, this company took an extra step and has created a fictional bio and optimized it. It just seems to go too far, as I believe people should opt into participating in social media as opposed to having their arm twisted into giving a company their private information in return for protecting their reputation to a small degree.

If you notice the title tag on this page (if you are unaware of a title tag, it’s at the very top of your browser, the title tag on my homepage says “The ‘Real’ Devin Downey”) it is a strong example of the challenges of balancing SEO and art. If I wanted to have a shot at ranking for any search engine industry terms, I’d need to change the headline on this page to something like, “Devin Downey, Search Engine Marketer”, because on this blog content management system, my title on my page is automatically placed in the title tag of the code. Now if I was much smarter, like my co-worker Rob Garner (he is brilliant), I could probably change the code, but that’s just not me. I don’t find Content Management Systems intuitive, they drive me crazy. I just think of ideas and work with the people who can make them happen. Since no one is being employed to do the code on this site, we are stuck with a headline title tag that is designed to be the best balance between SEO and art that I can figure out - ranking for my own name yet a bit sarcastic per my personality.

Lately, all of our clients have been stressing balance. The firm I work for employs a report called an Obstacles Analysis Report (OAR short). We should rename it the Balance of Search Engine Optimization and Art Report (BS for short). Our clients instruct us that we dare not tell one of their artists that the design technique they are utilizing is killing their search engine presence and literally trashing million of dollars of search visibility. “How do we build a business case for SEO?”, the artists ask, hoping that we don’t have an answer. The answer is often stated by taking their paid search efforts and mutiplying by a factor of four or five. That number can be staggering. Unfortunately, they often still don’t grasp the concept. That’s ok. Their bosses soon will.

This morning I received my first Google Alert that included an entry that I had created myself. It’s interesting that it contained both of my last two entries. I feel like a proud papa.

Ironically, I also received a Google Alert set for the name of my employer today that included a blog entry for someone we had just hired. I’m assuming that this new guy does not understand that Google Alerts pick up much of what is out on the web and that by mentioning our company name he has brought numerous fellow employees to his blog. Folks that for the most part otherwise would not know he existed. More than likely our CEO has read it by now. Considering all of the emotions he has on that page, I don’t think I’d like that kind of introduction to my new company. He’ll learn soon enough!