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.

Reputation Management Tool

I dabble a little with reputation management for a few of my clients and have been very successful at helping my clients. From time to time I plan on sharing some tools that I use successfully. If I mention a Reputation Management Tool on our blog, it is because it worked well for us.

LookUpPage.com: This tool has a free and/or paid service option. They have 3 packages: Free, Basic, and Pro. To create a “LookUpPage” for your business you will need to upgrade to “Pro” ($7.95 Per Month).

I have seen pretty good results and success with free and paid options. LookUpPage is a simple solution that will in most cases secure you a top ranking spot on Google when people search your name or business name. I advise upgrading to a basic or pro account to get the best outcome when using a service like this. Upgrading can make the service ad free, and in my experience an ad free web page ranks better on Google in some cases.

Using a profile page by LookUpPage is, in my opinion a good way to grab a top spot for your name on Google. Depending on how common or unique your name is, you may or may not see miraculous results when using this method to create highly visible pages.

If your name is “Donald trump” for example, you will be trying to compete with all of the results that appear for his name (which will be very hard).

If you name is unique or uncommon like “Donald Minx” then you will have only a few search results to compete with when trying to bury negative information.

I have seen great success with creating mini sites like the ones LookUpPage offers. Be sure to promote your LookUpPage in the same way you would any other website and I think you will also see great results with them.

 On The Web: www.LookUpPage.com

Wonder if LookUpPage.com Monitors their own online reputation? Lets’ see if they find this and comment on it!

Get Free Reputation Monitoring Today

It is infrequent to hear the word free without some sort of strings attached. In this occurrence, you can really get free reputation monitoring by simply doing it yourself.  It is so simple to monitor your own business or personal reputation online. There are companies that charge a monthly fee of $19.95 and up, to basically do what you can do free.  I believe that a dollar saved is a dollar earned. Before you go out and unearth a paid reputation monitoring service (not to be confused with reputation management), try to do it yourself first.

Here is how to monitor your own online reputation. Since Google has become not only the largest and most popular search engine, it has also become what I refer to as a “reputation engine”. Google usually (quickly in most cases) finds new information online before most search engines do.

All you in actuality have to do to monitor your online reputation is use what Google offers 100% complimentary: Google Alerts – a very effortless service that sends you an email whenever it discovers search results for the terms or keywords you chose, such as your name or company name.

Many online reputation management and monitoring companies tap in to this free service then charge you for something that costs nothing. It is so easy to set-up a Google Alert, all you need is an email address and you are set.

Head over to Google and set-up your own Google Alert today and you will know when something new hits the internet about you or the keywords you choose.  I use it and I love it!

Remove Rip Off Reports From Google

Forcing RipOffReport.com (Ed magedson) to remove a rip off report from the Rip Off Report website is nearly impossible. The website clearly states that they “Never Remove Complaints, Even if the person who filed the complaint requests it”. Not so fair if you ask me!

So how do these reputation management companies remove rip off reports? They in fact remove them from the top of Google’s search results, not from the rip off report website. The reality is that most rip off reports are revealed when people search for you or your company name on Google.

I do not believe or suspect that many consumers go directly to rip-off reports website and search company names on there. Most people go directly to Google to do research on people, companies, products and services. Google is the biggest reputation engine in the world! If you have harmful information showing up on Google about you, then you will need to launch a full scale reputation management campaign to fix the issue. The fix or remedy would be to push the negative links down the search results. The goal is to replace the negative information with positive information.

A few tips on how to Remove Rip Off Reports from the top of Google:

Create Online Profiles: Use sites like linkedin, FaceBook, Portfolio, Bolt, and others to create highly visible online social profiles. Always use the name you are trying to repair as the name and/or title.

Create A Blog (or 2): Create free blogs or your own hosted blog. Use the easy to use WordPress blogging platform or others to create keyword rich blogs and submit them to Google.

Register Domains: If you do not own “YourName (DotCom)” then you need to hurry and buy it before someone else does. Install a one page mini-site or a blog on the domain. Also register all TLD’s like .net, .org, .us, .biz, and others. Use all of the keyword rich domain names to your advantage.

Create Forum Accounts: Sign-up for as many forum accounts, use your name as the username and make a few posts on the topics you read. Utilize the signature feature most forums have. Add links to your blog in your signature. Always link from your name as the anchor text.

Promote Your Content: After you get all of your new profiles, mini-sites, and blogs up and running, it is time to promote them with strong SEO techniques. Use backlinks (get other sites to link to yours), add your blog url (link) to your online profiles and other sites link to one of your sites from all of the other ones to create one-way links. You can also buy links from other blogs to get some link juice!

These are basic tips that may help you. Remember there are many other methods and techniques that can be used. If you need assistance or have any questions let us know by posting a comment.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Here are some basic tips to consider when managing your online reputation.

1. Create online profiles. Don’t let others create your online identity. Create your own profiles and include the type of information you actually want to be found online about you. Use sites like linkedin, businesscard2.com.
2. Check what people are saying about you online. Keep an eye on search engines like Google and see what others are saying about you.
3. Stay on top of it. Don’t get lax about monitoring your online reputation. If necessary, perform weekly checks to see if there’s any information about you that could harmful.
4. Google yourself. The simplest way to find information about you or your company’s online reputation is to Google. See what kind of results pop up first. If the top results on Google are negative, you’ve got some work to do.
5. Assume everything can get on the web. Both in your personal and professional life, what you say online and off can come back to haunt you. Be safe and always assume any emails, conversations or photos can eventually end up on the internet.
6. Choose your words carefully. If you are blogging, running a website or just have a social media profile, be careful what you post. What you say may cause you problems in the future.
7. Know your weaknesses. If you know your business has a particular weakness that makes you prone to getting online complaints, try to correct the issue.
8. Protect yourself from hackers. This may seem like it goes without saying, but many people fail to adequately secure their online information. Make sure yours is as safe as it possibly can be. Hackers can assume your identity and ruin your reputation.
9. Keep social networks private. One way to daunt prying eyes is to keep your social networking profiles private to all except those you approve. This will keep casual viewers from seeing your information, good or bad.
10. Consider pseudonyms. If you do not want people online to know about you create a name for yourself to hide behind so you can’t be easily tracked.
11. Be proactive. Instead of waiting until you have an issue with your online reputation, stay ahead of the game. Search for what’s being said about you regularly so you’ll stay well informed.
12. Act fast. If you do find something said or posted about you online that you feel could be for the most part damaging to you, take action right away. Whether it’s your friend posting photos from your party night or someone you don’t know slandering your business, taking care of it sooner rather than later is paramount.
13. Keep your cool. You may be furious at what someone has said about you online, but don’t let it show. Keep your fury to yourself and off the internet where it can do more damage than good.
14. Hire a reputation management company if you find yourself in a situation you can not handle alone. There are many online reputation management companies that can help you.

Do you have any online reputation management tips to share? Post a comment and let us know!