Does your Online Reputation look foggy?

The bad results have usually some “juice” behind them. And very often the bad results reside on trusted web sites, like government pages or web sites from Newspapers etc. If you want to push these negative results off their places, you need much more than just creating a few social media profile pages.

The profile pages that you have created in order to outrank the negative results need to be charged with some serious link juice. After they are charged up with link juice, they can start to outrank your bad stuff. How much link juice you will need, depends a lot on what kind of PageRank you target has. The higher the PageRank, the more effort in necessary in order to outrank them.

Google, Bing and Yahoo gives a lot of trust to government web sites. The same is true for web sites from newpapers and other media. If they have published some negative items about you or your company, you basically have to outrank them with your good results.

It took years for these web sites to build up to the size that they have now. So, you can not expect to easily outrank them with some cheap social media profile pages without any further work.

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. (A quote from Google Webmaster Guidelines.)

Often it is very obvious which link is good and which link is not good. If the links points to some bad site or a site that is doing something fishy, you are doomed if you link there. Also sites that use questionable techniques are not recommenced as online friends.

But sometimes the badness of a link can be nicely hidden. Here is an example:

The other day I found a comment on this post High PR Web 2.0 Properties for Link Building in SEO :

Looked to me like a relevant comment. I checked the URL and it looked fine too, so I went ahead and approved the comment.

Fast forward to today. I found this little tool on www.davidairey, to check good and bad link neighborhoods:
Text Link Checker Tool. I keyed in my domain and wham -  it spit out all my links and gives some data on it. To my surprise I learned that I was linking to a bad neighborhood:

I thought “that is strange”, I am not aware that I ever linked to that domain. “Was my blog hacked? Did I use an infected plugin?” Well, nothing that serious. I scrolled up and found this:

As the comments on this blog are nofollow anyhow and this particular page (fwisp.com) is only a bookmarking page, that can be used by anyone, there is no real danger in it. But I added bad neighborhood link checking to my routines for all my sites and all my customers sites.

If you hire an SEO company, remember to ask them to also check your links according to this.

In Real Life You Fix Your Reputation with a Rose - Online Reputation Management is Different

Photo credit: Small Rose by Christopher Jeschke CMJ Photography

That’s not good! But it can be handled. Here is how it is done: First you isolate the listing or listings that you want to attack. Then you decide how to go about it. Usually it is best to start a campaign to outrank the bad stuff immediately. Sometimes it is also possible to yank the negative listing out of place. This can by done by direct communication, indirect communication (legal means).

The best approach to fix your online reputation is in most cases to just plainly outrank the bad stuff with your good content. There is an excellent article on marketingpilgrim.com where Andy Beal describes in detail on Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results.

You can use Social Media Sites to get your online reputation back under control. If you want to know how to do it, you can see what David Wallace suggests in an article titled Using Social Media To Help Manage Online Reputation.

But if you only address the search results, you are only treating the result, not the cause. In each case it is necessary to also address the root of the problem. Listen to the person that spreads the bad news if you want to improve your online reputation. Sometimes the things are justified or at least have some truth to it.  If you are willing to listen, it is very often possible to get the bad news removed and turn that disgruntled person into a firm believer.

It is also important for your reputation management to monitor what is being said about you online. You can use Google alerts, Yahoo alerts, RSS feed subscriptions to search results Technorati, Feedster, Yahoo & Google News, BlogPulse and  Social Media via tags: tagbulb.com, tagfetch.com, keotag.com as suggested in Basics of Online Reputation Management.

If you don’t want to do the reputation management yourself, you can always hire me and I’ll get that stuff handled.