Social Network Username Search & Protection

KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media websites. This service is a neat Reputation Management Tool that all reputation conscious individuals should consider using.

A lot of people and business are at risk of becoming a victim of internet identity theft. This is where someone can pose as you on social networks and other username based websites like forums. Imagine if someone found “you” on MySpace or a similar social network and started chatting with “you” about private details, only to find out it really was not you. There are many risks when it comes to internet ID theft, most of the time the biggest risk is your online reputation. If someone was posing as you on a social network and started saying all types of damaging things on their account, people will think these are your words.

Protecting your online reputation is very important in today’s WWW.

The service that KnowEm offers lets you see who else is using your username on over 100 popular social networks.  They also offer to protect your name by registering accounts on these networks for you.

Another great service is the social network search engine optimized profile creation service that iPorfileMaker.com offers. They create full profiles with your custom content. This service is geared toward reputation repair and includes the identity protection as well.

• working on iprofilemaker a new service we are launching #

Free Press Release Sites

Here is a list of Free Press Release sites I have used with good success. A free press release site is great for SEO and Reputation Management. Enjoy the list and if you have any to share please post a comment and let us all know!

24-7PressRelease.com - Free release distribution

1888PressRelease.com - Free distribution, paid services gets you better placement and eternal archiving.

ClickPress.com - Distributes to sites like Google News and Topix.net.

EcommWire.com - Focuses on ecommerce and requires you include an image, 3 keywords and links.

Express-Press-Release.com - Free Distribution Company with (Purportedly) offices in 12 states.

Free-Press-Release.com - Easy press release distribution for free, more features for paid accounts.

Free-Press-Release-Center.info - Distributes your release, offers a web page with one keyword link to your site. Pro upgrade will give you three links, permanent archiving and more.

I-Newswire.com - Allows for free distribution to sites and search engines, premium membership differs only slightly in adding in graphics.

NewswireToday.com - All the usual free distribution tools, premium service includes logo, product picture and more.

PR.com - Not only will they distribute your press releases, but you can also set up a full company profile.

PR9.net - Ad supported press distribution site.

PR-Inside.com - A European-based free press release distribution site.

PRBuzz.com - Completely free distribution to search engines, news sites, and blogs.

PRCompass.com - Distribute your press release with a free or paid version, others can vote it up.

PRUrgent.com - Not only distributes your release, but teaches you how to write one, and even offers downloadable samples for you to work with.

Press-Base.com - Submit your release for free and get on their front page and the category of your choice.

PressAbout.com - A Free blog formatted PR service.

PressMethod.com - Free press release distribution no matter what, but extra services based on the size of your contribution.

PRLeap.com - Free distribution to search engines, newswires, and RSS feeds. Paying will get you better placement.

PRLog.org - Free distribution to Google News and other search engines.

TheOpenPress.com - Gives free distribution for plain formatted releases, fees for HTML-coded releases.

Enjoy the list and if you have any to share or have something to say please post a comment and let us all know!

Google Profiles Looking Weak To Me!

I recently entertained the idea of creating a Google Profile for myself and went through the process and decided to not use it. Why? Well, it did not have many feature that were up to my expectations, at least from Google. As far as reputation management goes, it will make a 1st page listing at the very bottom of the results page when someone searches your name. I think that is they really want to lure users in and entice them to use Google Profiles they should make the Profiles appear on the top of search results or within the search results like they do videos from time to time.

The #1 use of online profiles (As I See It) is for reputation management and reputation repair. The Google Profile offers very little in my opinion when dealing with reputation repair.

Sure, it is free and you might as well make a profile with them if you are actively repairing  your reputation. The service has a few basic feature and none that really excite me. Here are the features as listed on Google’s site:

1. Receive messages. Enable the ‘Send a message’ feature to allow anyone with a Google Account to email you without revealing your email address.

2. Add photos. Enhance your profile by embedding photos from Flickr or Picasa.

3. Create a page about you. Write a short bio in the About me tab, reveal your superpower, and tell people what you still can’t find using Google.

4. Add your contact information. Share your information with your friends and family, so they always have the most up-to-date information. You control who sees it.

4. Add links to your other profiles and sites. Make it easier for friends to see your other content on the Web. You can link to Google content, including your Blogger blog, public Picasa Web Albums and Google Reader shared items as well as other pages on the Web such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

5. Show your location. ‘My places’ includes all the cities you’ve entered on your profile. Your current location and where you’ve lived are displayed on a map.  

The best feature above in my opinion is the ability to link up to your other profiles like Twitter, faceBook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. I guess Google Profiles are not for me. I am certain many people will find a good use for them. If Google adds more visibility features to the profiles I will jump on board also.

What do you think about Google Profiles Service? Let us all know by posting a comment. Google if you read this will you please let us know if new feature may be on the way?

Reputation Management & Social Networks

Online reputation management is quickly becoming more important as more and more friends, family and employers search your name. Even if you are constantly on your best behavior online or you have a fairly unique name, as the population grows and more people become creators of online content, there’s a big chance that people will interpret others activity online as your own!

Taking charge of or managing search engine ranking for your own name is fairly easy for an SEO (search engine optimizer), but what can the average person do? The best solution is to utilize social networks like facebook, linkedin, twitter, and many more. There are hundreds if not thousands of good social network you can become a member of and 99% of them are free to use. The paid ones may only charge for add-ons like featured profiles or special plug-ins.

Using social networks to help you repair or manage your online reputation is a method used by most if not all reputation management companies. Creating profiles on social networks can be very time consuming, but it is worth the effort in most cases. Usually to suppress bad press about your name on search engines like Google, you will need a lot of online profiles (Dozens Of Them). Most of these profiles will rank well on search engines when people search your name. Updating your profile regularly and adding content to it frequently will increase the chance of it out ranking negative information online.

There are even companies like iProfilemaker.com that will build hundreds of social profiles for you. Social profiles are a huge tool when trying to push down negative information on search engine. You can even get a fair amount of web traffic from social profile sites. Our blog (SeoFriendly.com) gets a few visitors a day from Twitter and other profile sites.

Reputation management & Rip Off Reports

Your online reputation can make or break you in this day and age. What are people saying about your company online? Has your company been featured on the website RipOffReport.com? If so, then you will need to act fast to save/repair your online reputation.

There are a few options when it comes to starting a reputation management campaign. The first option is the DIY approach. If you decide to do it yourself, be prepared to invest money and a lot of time in repairing your reputation. Expect to spend weeks if you are trying to remove a rip off report complaint from the top of Google. A rip off report is a nasty little bugger to have on your back. To get a rip off report to “go away” completely is almost impossible. To have it completely removed from the internet is not going to happen. You must focus on pushing it down the search results so it is not as visible.

Rip Off Reports rank very good on Google and other search engines.  I have seen some of my client’s rip off reports rank higher than their own website. Pushing these complaint links down is sometimes a very hard task and can take weeks as previously mentioned. You must be prepared to spend the money to make it happen. The average cost if you are doing it yourself is most likely $1000+ (if you factor in the time…More!). If you hire a reputation management company to help you with the issue, then you may be looking at $2500+ to get a rip off report moved from the top.

To do it yourself you will need to scour the internet for places to make online profiles like linkedin, facebook, wapr, and more. You will need to register youname.com and install a site or blog about yourself. You may want to blaze out a small press release with “You Name” in the title, description, and body. Maybe do a press release that introduces your blog. Submit different variations of your PR to multiple PR distribution sites for more exposure. More Tips

If you plan on hiring a company or SEO Firm to help you make sure they have a guarantee or at least a very clear agreement. If they are unable to push a complaint link down, then you may be entitled to a partial refund.  Some reputation management companies offer “Guarantees” but rarely stand behind them. They know you won’t complain about it if they don’t because if you do they will slam your name even more. Remember a reputation management company not only can help you by pushing stuff down but they can bring a lot of stuff up on search engines. Remember the article ‘Don’t piss off the SEO Guy’.

That being said, a reputation manager may be what you need. If you have multiple online complaints ranking high on Google, if you can not get them to move on your own, if you have no time to DIY, if you want it done faster, then you may want a rep company to help you.  Try to choose a company that has dealt with rip off reports and these types of issues before. If they haven’t then they may be in store for a rude awakening. They may not know what they are getting in to.  Removing a rip off report and certain complaint links takes a certain technique and method.

Browse our blog for more reputation management tips. We are a team of SEO’s and Reputation Managers. We may be able to assist you with Removing Rip Off Reports. You can feel free to contact us if you need help.

How To React To The Google Ban

Google expects that you should make pages for users, not for search engines: “Don’t deceive your users, or present different content to search engines than you display to users,” they say, and Google goes on to list the following banned advice:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Avoid Keyword Stuffing - Adding random Keywords In Your Footer.
• Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

You can get your site back in to Google’s good graces if you follow some simple steps. It may require a complete revamp of your website and SEO techniques, but it is worth the effort.

• First, clean up your act. (Fix the Issues)
• Then send Google a very polite email where you acknowledge and describe what you (or your search engine marketing firm) have done.
• Tell Google that you have read their guidelines and that you will not anything like this again.
• If you hired an SEO firm that spammed on your behalf, release the firm’s name.
• Always Include full contact information.

Do apologize and make no excuses. Google will frequently reply to such polite requests and you may find some of your pages back in the index within a couple of weeks. However, it can take months before the search engine has spidered your complete site again.

The Google Ban Notice - How to get Google to tell you when you have crossed the line

It is in fact possible to get Google to inform you when they deem you have broken the rules.

Webmasters using Google’s Sitemap feature may possibly (we repeat: may) get an email from Google telling them when they have crossed the line.

Google’s Matt Cutts puts it this way:

(…) I think the ideal search engine would also tell legitimate site owners when they risk not doing well in Google. On the other hand, if the webspam team detects a spammer that is creating dozens or hundreds of sites with doorway pages followed by a sneaky redirect, there’s no reason that we’d want the spammer to realize that we’d caught those pages…”

So Google may try and tell you when they believe you have broken the rules. This is the kind of email you might expect:

No pages from your site are currently included in Google’s index due to violations of the webmaster guidelines. Please review our webmaster guidelines and modify your site so that it meets those guidelines. Once your site meets our guidelines, you can request reinclusion and we’ll evaluate your site.

If you find the issue and clean it up, then click on the “Submit a reinclusion request” and fill out the form.

Stay on top of the issue and be proactive in getting your website Re-indexed. Do not bug the spam team every day or every other day. They are very busy and will reply when necessary to your requests. Give it time, you made the mistakes and it is not Google’s fault that you were banned. It is yours or your SEO guys mistake.

Have you ever been banned by Google? How did you react? What did you do? Share your tips below by commenting so others can learn how to fix a Google Ban.