Ad Words: Revenge is Cheap in 2007

First off let me say that I do not condone this sort of activity, however it is rapidly becoming more common place. In the spirit of the season I am going to tell you about a scary new way that people can be destroying your reputation for a couple of bucks a week.

Let's take the fictitious story of Jimmy and his local Porsche dealership. We will pretend that Jimmy went out and bought a brand new 2008 Boxster in his favorite color of Sea Foam Green. Jimmy loved his car for the first 150 miles or so until the engine fell right out of the car in the middle or rush hour traffic. Suddenly Jimmy isn't very happy at all, so he calls the dealership asking them to come get him, the car and what is left of the engine. Well things go from bad to worse and Jimmy is left with his very expensive car and a box of engine pieces standing on the curb.

Our hero eventually gets his car put back together but at an extreme cost and so he vows revenge against the dealership. How does he plan to get revenge? He starts a smear campaign using a "disposable" blog and his adwords account. Jimmy writes an SEO friendly blog and then sets up an adwords account with 20 bucks and just lets it run.

For most dealerships a smear campaign like this would be earth shattering, because the average dealership does not have a reputation manager on staff. If this were to happen to a dealership without a website, or a poorly designed website the ramifications could be catastrophic. It would take the dealership forever to get that link buried if they ever even found out that someone had done this to them.