The problem is that reports filed on RipoffReport.com are not verified, and so it has become a tool for scam artists and other types of problem customers to libel and defame honest businesses and their owners.

I’ve gotten a handful of RipoffReport.com complaints in my seven years in doing business online. All of them are completely groundless and posted in bad faith. For the most part, they’re posted by scam artist customers who make an unreasonable demand, such as for a refund without returning the product in question. When their bogus demand isn’t met, they retaliate with a Ripoff Report.

(Some customers will threaten to file a report if they don’t get what they want. What they don’t realize is that such a threat constitutes felony extortion in almost all states, and they can get in some really serious legal hot water for making such threats.)

Over the past couple of years, a cottage industry has surfaced of SEO companies who promise to make your Ripoff Reports disappear by “burying” them in search results with hundreds of new listings that make your business name, or whatever other phrase you choose, dominate the search results and push the Ripoff Reports so far down that no one will ever see them.

Well, I have some good news: It appears that Google has “slapped” RipoffReport.com’s page rank to such an extent that the negative publicity they cause may soon be a thing of the past.

I was pleasantly surprised one day when I noticed that the few Ripoff Reports that dishonest customers have filed against me seemed to have magically disappeared from Google search results. I investigated, and quickly learned that RipoffReport.com’s home page rake is down to PR 4, and the actual reports themselves are showing PR 0 or PR 1.

This means that Google has finally gotten wise to their game, and is turning off their gravy train.

This is great news for internet marketers who have been defamed by jerk customers who post bogus and untrue reports whenever they don’t get what they want. Now that Google has apparently learned the truth about RipoffReport.com and put them in their place, safeguarding your reputation has just become a lot easier.

(In case you’re wondering, I’m such an anti-SEO person for the simple fact that you must optimize your sites for conversions, not SEO. I use external sites to drive traffic to my high-converting marketing site. I don’t mess with my site’s copy, content, and structure to make Google happy. No way. Not ever.)

Having said all that, I still spend a large amount of money on Google AdWords every month. Except for the past few days, that is, while my account was temporarily “Google Slapped” due to landing page issues that have since been corrected.

Here’s the funny thing: My opt-ins and sales didn’t suffer terribly while I was without AdWords. This was not what I expected at all.

You see, when you’re paying for traffic, you tend to focus on optimizing that source of traffic above all others. It only makes sense, since your dollars are at stake. The result is that you tend to forget that traffic is even coming in from other sources.

The bottom-line is this: You must exploit all available sources of traffic. In doing so, you diversify your traffic sources, thereby hedging against unforeseen events (like my Google Slap), while simultaneously enjoying the high ROI of pay-per-click advertising. This is what I do, and it’s the reason why losing AdWords for a few days only resulted in a drop in traffic of only about one-third, rather than a complete shutdown of my business – something those who market solely on AdWords run a constant risk of, especially now that Google has gone ban-happy.

Here’s a brief list of traffic-generation methods that will keep visitors coming to your site, with our without PPC:

Article Marketing. Article marketing is one of the most underrated methods of traffic generation. Simply write a content- and keyword-rich article about once a month (more if you’re new to marketing online), and upload it to EzineArticles.com. Include a link to your site in the resource box along with some incentive for people to click on it, like a free report or free e-course.

Blogging. Set up a WordPress blog with my recommended list of plugins and you’ll have a traffic-generation machine on autopilot. Be sure to post at least two or three times a week to keep the search engines happy, and include a link and incentive to get people to click through to your marketing site, like the ad for my AdWords site you see below this post.

YouTube. YouTube is becoming one of my top sources of high-converting traffic. It has very high prominence in search engines, and videos give you the capability to both massively give yourself credibility, as well as to provide valuable content that will keep viewers coming back for more. Best of all, with video technology advancing as quickly as it has, you can produce high-quality video with an inexpensive camera like a Flip HD and upload it in minutes.

Podcasting & Vodcasting. After YouTube, my iTunes video podcasts are my next largest source of high-converting traffic. All you need to do is set up a blog to host the video content (you can use your existing WordPress blog), set up a free account on FeedBurner with iTunes podcasting enabled, and complete the “Add A Podcast” form in the iTunes music store. You’ll be up and running in just a few days. Best of all, each time you create a new video for YouTube, simultaneously post it on your blog, which will automatically feed to iTunes via FeedBurner. That way you’re showing your videos on both YouTube and iTunes, with zero additional work on your part!

Twitter. First things first: I’m not a huge fan of Twitter for business. I think most people who tell you that you can explode your sales with Twitter just want to sell you their latest Twitter information product. Where I do like Twitter, however, is integrated with your blog. I use a free WordPress plugin called Tweet This, that automatically tweets the title and link to every new blog post the instant I click the “Publish” button. Combine this with a large list of Twitter followers (follow people with tons of followers and turn on auto-follow), and you’ll drive a nice amount of traffic to your blog. This gets comments active, pushing you up in search engine rankings, which in turn get you more traffic and more clickthroughs to your marketing site.

That’s the basic list. Do those things diligently and you won’t have to worry much if and when your AdWords account gets slapped!

In other words, I’d been hit with the dreaded Google Slap!

I’m not the only one lately. Fortunately, I was able to fix my problem – the use of a pure “squeeze page,” which Google frowns upon. I simply changed it to include site navigation and company information, therefore meeting Google’s guidelines. But not everyone is so lucky….

I say that because although I was hit with the Google Slap, where all of your keywords are reduced to QS 1, thousands of AdWords advertisers have been shut down completely over the last couple of months, and even banned for life!

The reason?

Flagrant violations of the Google AdWords terms of service. You know, that button you clicked “I Agree” on when you signed up for AdWords.

The fact of the matter is that certain kinds of sites, most namely PPC arbitrage sites and affiliate “review” sites, have never really been permitted by Google. That’s where the Google Slap originated – Google’s attempt to frustrate and discourage the PPC arbitrage and affiliate “review” site crowd to cut the crap and stick with legitimate marketing.

Unfortunately, many of them didn’t get the message, and starting around September of this year, Google dropped the hammer on them. Banned. For life. And no chance of opening a new account under a different name/address/domain either. There are stories on the web of people who used a friends’s name, billing address, credit card, set up sites on entirely different domains, and even logged in with a completely different internet connection, IP address, and to be totally safe, different computers and routers since it’s suspected that Google tracks hardware mac addresses.

No go. Big Brother Google somehow always knows.

So, let this be a warning: If you’re trying to run “get rich quick” PPC arbitrage or other schemes that are outright banned by Google, the chances are that you’re going to get banned too. If you want to make money in Internet Marketing, you need to sell legitimate products through legitimate business models. “Get rich quick” was never a reality to begin with, and the enforcement group at Google AdWords is making damn sure there’s no “get rich quick” nonsense happening in their system, either.

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