Online Reputation Management FAQ

Online reputation management is a way to protect a company or person from negative online publicity.

A strategy must be made to determine how to guard against these attacks, what the nature of the attack is, and also where it is coming from. The strategy must include search engine optimization tactics, the goal of which is to get the negative information about a person or company on the internet out of public view.

Search engine optimization is the increase of quantity or quality of traffic to a website from search engines through organic search traffic. SEO involves maximizing a website’s likelihood of being found by search engines.

If there is negative information about a company or a person ranking on the search engines, it can dissuade users from visiting a site or purchasing a product or service from that company. This ultimately deters customers from using your services and causes them to choose a competitor that doesn’t have negative reviews or information online. Search engines are very powerful in making or breaking an online reputation.

Google is the main search engine with the highest number of users. They have over 1 trillion pages in their index and grow by the billions every day. Yahoo, Bing, Ask and AltaVista are the next top five search engine spots.

This can vary depending on the nature of the attack. Whether there is a high volume of negative content or not can determine how long it would take for significant results relating to your online reputation to emerge, which could range anywhere from a few weeks to a year.

Management of online reputation attacks is very complex and requires a lot of work on various websites with positive content that outnumbers and outranks the negative content. It can take weeks and months for the new content and keywords to begin ranking higher than the previous negative content.

The law is often on the side of websites containing negative content, as they are not legally obligated to take it down. It can take years fighting this battle with lawyers. It is much more efficient to promote your company or yourself and rise above the negative content in search ranking than it is to force the sites to take down the harmful content.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to eliminate every negative review. A request can be made to the webmaster to remove the negative information, but this is definitely not possible in every situation.