UC-Davis Was Ridiculed for Trying to Sway Search Results. Many Other Colleges Do the Same.

Although the University of California at Davis has drawn heavy fire for its efforts to clean up its image on the Internet, the means it used to look good when Googled is common in higher education.

Search-engine optimization, which involves the intentional manipulation of Internet-search results to create a good first impression online, is widely practiced by public-relations firms that serve colleges and, in some cases, by administrators themselves.

“All institutions, in some form or fashion, are doing some form of search optimization as part of their marketing efforts or their communications efforts,” says Jason L. Simon, vice president at SimpsonScarborough, a marketing and branding firm that works with colleges.

Joshua Dodson, who is director of search-engine optimization for Southern New Hampshire University and teaches an online course on the practice for college employees elsewhere, says other higher-education institutions are establishing positions similar to his as the need is “starting to become more obvious.”

The Katehi Years at UC-Davis

Linda P.B. Katehi served as chancellor of the University of California at Davis from 2009 to 2016, a period marked by controversy and conflict. Here’s a look at her record.

• A Year After Her Ouster, Linda Katehi Still Can’t Resist a Fight
• The 5 Missteps That Toppled Linda Katehi
• The Slow-Motion Downfall of Linda Katehi
• In Fight Over UC-Davis Chancellor’s Future, Where Does the Faculty Stand?

Other colleges, of course, have not faced the same criticism as UC-Davis for hiring firms to help bury online references to unflattering events — in Davis’s case, an infamous 2011 incident in which campus police officers pepper-sprayed seated protesters. Angered by a Sacramento Bee report on that PR maneuver, lawmakers and students are calling for Davis’s chancellor, Linda P.B. Katehi, to resign.

In many respects, however, little separates what Davis did to improve its image from what other colleges do, suggesting that their efforts also carry risks.

What follows is a primer on search-engine optimization, its perceived benefits, and how it can go wrong.

Why are colleges focused on Internet-search results?

Colleges’ marketing and public-relations departments recognize that prospective students and their parents get much of their information about them online and seldom look past the first page or two of search results.

The results of such an online search can form “critical initial impressions” of a college, and “it is almost malpractice not be mindful of what comes up when someone is Googling their name,” says Dorie Clark, a marketing-strategy consultant in New York whose clients have included Yale University.

If the top results of a search produce links to discussions of some embarrassing incident, it can lead to drops in enrollments and may even threaten a college’s survival, says Eric Schiffer, chief executive officer of Reputation Management Consultants, a firm that has helped several colleges fight damage to their image online.

“One incident should not define an institution that has been doing great work for a hundred years,” Mr. Schiffer says. He would not name his firm’s clients in higher education, but says “for them to not fight back — to let the media walk all over them — would be insane.”

How does search-engine optimization work?

To create a good first impression, the technique tries to push links to positive publicity to the top of search results, focusing on content and the mechanics of how search engines work.

Ms. Clark says one goal is to “flood Google with positive stories” in hopes they will rise to the top of rankings and “make negative stories diminish in importance.”

The strategy also involves understanding, and exploiting, how search-engine algorithms work. It can involve content-related considerations, such as publishing words or phrases that you anticipate as the subjects of searches. Because outsiders’ links to a web page will help drive up its Google rankings, it is important to publish material that people will deem link-worthy. On a more technical level, simple tweaks in the coding underlying a website can help improve its Google ranking.

What strategies are considered fair game?

Experts on search-engine optimization distinguish between widely accepted “white hat” strategies and “black hat” strategies that generally are frowned upon. Falling under “white hat” are most content-related strategies other than the creation of fake or undeveloped sites that serve mainly to attract or redirect web traffic. Seen as “black hat” are blatant and disingenuous efforts to game search-engine algorithms, such as paying others to link to a page.

The penalties for those caught using “black hat” strategies typically involve being forced down in a search engine’s rankings or being banned by that engine entirely. It’s important to note that the controversy surrounding UC-Davis has little to do with allegations that it employed “black hat” tactics, and instead focuses on how much it paid its consultants to try to keep bad publicity on the pepper-spray incident from haunting it online.

How did UC-Davis get into trouble?

The Sacramento Bee’s exposé on Davis said the university had paid more than $175,000 in recent years to consultants charged with improving its online image. It quoted one of the consulting firms, Nevins & Associates of Towson, Md., as having committed to help the campus develop content on Google platforms to “expedite the eradication of references to the pepper-spray incident in search results on Google for the university and the chancellor.”

A Pepper-Spray Incident and Its Aftermath

Noah Berger for The Chronicle

Background articles on the 2011 incident in which a police officer pepper-sprayed seated protesters at the University of California at Davis, and its persistence in memory:

• UC-Davis Paid $175,000 to Clean Up Its Image

• UC-Davis Chancellor Reflects on ‘Horrible’ Debacle at 2011 Protest

• Scathing Report on UC-Davis Pepper-Spray Incident Faults Chancellor and Police

• UC-Davis Chancellor Apologizes as Outrage Builds Over Pepper-Spray Use on Peaceful Protesters

In a written statement issued on Monday, Chancellor Katehi expressed regret for the contracts. “In hindsight,” she said, “we should have been more careful in reviewing some of the more unrealistic and ridiculous scope-of-work claims in the written proposals of our outside vendors.” She added that “none of our communications efforts were intended — or attempted — to erase online content or rewrite history.” And in an interview with The Chronicle on Wednesday, she said she did not plan to resign.

David Nevins, a former chairman of the University System of Maryland’s Board of Regents who is president of Nevins & Associates, on Wednesday said “there probably was a little too much hyperbole” in his firm’s offer to perform services for Davis. He said his firm knew it could not remove online references to the pepper-spray incident, and instead focused on ensuring that references to it were offset by favorable publicity about the institution.

Mike Paul, president of Reputation Doctor LLC, a New York firm that specializes in reputation management and crisis-related public relations, said the amounts Davis paid its consultants “are not big budgets in our business.” He added, however, that the services the firms were asked to provide were not in keeping with his advice to clients, which is to deal squarely and publicly with the root cause of a public-relations crisis rather than “planting stories” or “using algorithms to try to push something from Page 1 to Page 5" in Google search rankings.

“Authenticity and trust,” he said, “is what you are trying to regain.”

What may be most complicating the Davis campus’s bid to regain trust is not its embrace of such tactics, but its decision to spell out exactly what it was trying to make people forget.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.