Avoid These Online Reputation Management Blunders

Your online reputation can be one of your most valuable assets or one of your biggest impediments.  If someone Googles your name or your business and discovers detrimental, misleading information, it could prove disastrous.   What if it is read by prospective customers or potential employers?  Your chances of building a positive relationship with those people now may have been eliminated.  A bad internet reputation can hurt you, your family, your business, and your future.

When you discover negative information about yourself or your business online, your first reaction will probably be the desire to strike back.  You may decide to post angry rebuttals or send scathing emails to the offending author. This could prove to be a critical error, though; so how should you handle wounds to your online reputation?  First, it’s important to know what not to do when you are attempting reputation management.

If you follow your instinct to write replies to negative comments about yourself, you actually boost that unfavorable information higher up in the search engines’ rankings.  Search engines base their rankings on the number of visits to a site, the frequency of added information, etc. By drawing attention to the post, it makes it easier for others to locate it as well. 

If, on the other hand, you email the post’s author directly, you may be giving that person additional ammunition to use against you.  They can twist your reply around, take parts of it out of context, and use it to advance their attacks.

You may find yourself tempted to try to squash the bad publicity by using some unethical techniques on your own website.  These are known as black hat SEO practices.  These sneaky methods may temporarily push your ranking up the ladder, but you will almost certainly be penalized eventually for employing these tactics.  Your site could even be banned for using unethical practices.  It’s not worth the risk, so here are techniques you need to refrain from:

·         Invisible Text:  Sometimes people type keywords in white on a white background so the words disappear from the human eye but may be detected by search engine spiders. 

·         Keyword Stuffing:  Writing a word or set of words repeatedly without any sensible text to go with it is known as keyword stuffing and is a shifty attempt to climb the search engine ranks. 

·         Doorway Pages:  Another black hat technique is called doorway pages.  These are faux websites that ‘redirect’ visitors to another site.  The belief is that this tactic will increase the ranking of the main website, but it never works that way; in fact, it usually results in lowering the rankings of all the pages involved.

·          Content Cloning:  Content cloning is duplicate content cut and pasted from one site to another.  When identical content is found at too many sites, search engines consider it spam.

·         Link Farming:  When done correctly, getting quality links to your content is beneficial, but the key phrase is ‘quality’ links.  There are unscrupulous link farmers that will promise to build your page’s rating by providing numerous links, but it turns out that those links are completely unrelated to your topic.  If a search engine discovers a link farm, the farm is usually removed from that engine’s directory and anyone caught using that link farmer may be penalized.

Resist the temptation to fight back with scathing words or black hat tricks.  Instead, focus on proven methods of improving online reputation management.   This involves creating original content that readers find interesting and pertinent.  You can write about yourself, your business, your hobbies, or anything constructive with which you are familiar. 

Try to concentrate on a few related subjects and begin building a reputation as an expert in your field.  Don’t throw in keywords just for the sake of having keywords on your page.  Pay attention to the quality of your writing so readers are more likely to spread the word about your post by sharing it on Facebook or other sites.

Repairing damage to your online reputation takes time and effort.  If you don’t have the time, patience, or know how to do the job, you may want to consider hiring a reputation management service.

You do want to avoid companies that promise they can fix your online reputation overnight, though.  Just like any other industry, the reputation management business attracts its fair share of shady operators whose only real interest is getting your money.  Choose a reputable reputation management firm to help you build an exemplary reputation using effective and ethical methods. 

There is no quick fix for a damaged online reputation.  If you don’t feel like you will be able to devote yourself to the procedure, why not ask for help?  Your valuable online reputation is worth the investment.