Flaming sites, also called “anti-company” sites, are most often developed by customers or clients of blue-chip organizations that feel they have been mistreated in some way. The sites aim to criticize, ridicule or just complain about a customer’s specific experience with that organization, and many times, beg for site visitors to contribute complaints of their own. Flaming sites are most often created under a similar URL to the actual business name such as “starbucked.com,” a website developed by an angry Starbucks customer.
Although flaming sites are infrequent, businesses need to be aware of the ramifications. One such concern is that an anti-company site can appear before the legitimate company website in the search results for a company-related keyword phrase that may have been queried by a genuine customer or prospect. There are various search engine optimization techniques that can be implemented to combat such occurrences.
