Reputation Management
A business or individuals reputation is important and can easily be tarnished on the internet with just a couple of bad reviews. This is where reputation management comes in, I’m going to teach you abit about controlling your reputation online and what to do if someone starts posting bad review about you or your site.
First things first, we need to look at the law and where you legally stand if someone is writing bad reviews about you or your website. As long as the reviews are factual and not malicious there is nothing you can do, if the reviews are all lies and designed to ruin your reputation based on lies then you have a legal leg to stand on. People can post what they like about you or your business as long as its the truth, the minute they start spreading lies is when it becomes slander and a criminal matter.
Unfortunately we cant control other websites around the web so contacting sites to take reviews down is pointless and a waste of time, unless there breaking the law ofcourse. So the only thing we can do to control our reputation is to control what comes up on the first two pages of the search engines. Users tend not to click through to page three in the search engines and usually find what there looking for within the first two pages, so as long as we can control the first two pages we’ll be fine.
The way to do this is to publish article and reviews about yourself or your business on as many different sites as possible. Then you promote those pages by building inbound links to help it rank on the first two pages. The more reviews and articles you publish the better, I am currently doing abit of reputation management for myself “Michael Tedder” not because there are bad reviews about me as I can assure you there aren’t, but I want to be able to control the search results for my name.
I have created micro sites, written articles for various blogs and dripped content into a blog network. I am part of a blog network of 20,000+ blogs so being able to release content on other sites is easier for me than others.
If you have been in your niche then for a few years then other webmaters will naturally mention you or your website in a positive way, so all you need to do is just promote that page on there site until its on page one or two. I have been in the seo field for the whole of my online career which is 7 years plus, and I have helped thousands of website owners so naturally there is already content about me or one of my businesses, all I need to do is get it ranked for my name.
We don’t have access to the sites displaying our reviews so we cant do any on-site optimization, the only thing we can do to get it ranked is to build high quality inbound links to that page promoting the term you want to rank for, in my case its my name.
Have ago yourself, its a lot easier than you think. Web 2.0 sites like hubpages.com and blogger.com make it even easier to produce content from different sites.
