SEO for Reputation Management

If you run a website, own a business, or manufacture a product, it is quite possible that it will receive negative publicity on the web at some time. This could be in the form of a news article, blog posting, review, or forum topic. Either way, it has the potential to harm your reputation and decrease revenue. If negative publicity of this type is false or does not accurately represent the business, consider using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as part of your reputation management efforts…

The higher the page that is harming your reputation appears in search engine results (for the business or product’s name, or related keywords), the more it is a concern. One SEO reputation management technique to counteract this is to boost the search result rankings of other pages containing more favorable information. Placing links to such pages on your own web site will help accomplish this, as search engines generally give higher ranks to the results of pages with more links to them on other sites. If there aren’t any other sites with information about the product or business, consider issuing a newsworthy, positive press release about it; these will often spread to other web sites. Try submitting such press releases to a major article directory which accepts them (like GoArticles.com) as a component of the SEO reputation management campaign.

Likewise, reducing the number of links to the webpage with the negative information will also help decrease its prominence. If the page has false information and you can prove it, consider contacting any website or blog owners who have linked to it, politely providing them with reasons and/or data on why it is false. If the claims have received a great deal of attention and are causing significant damage to the business’s reputation, another option is to create an SEO optimized webpage on your own site refuting the accusations. Make sure this page is linked from a Site Map or another page on the web site, so that search engine spiders will be able to find it. If the undesirable page has been submitted to a social bookmarking service (like Reddit or Digg), it is very easy to create an account and “downvote” its link; this will help reduce the page’s listing prominence or make it disappear.

Following the above-mentioned tips should help you more effectively carry out online reputation management while utilizing SEO techniques. It is best not to use any aggressive, threatening, or unethical methods for accomplishing this; management practices of this type may be revealed and used to additionally worsen your reputation.