Don’t like what you see when you Google your name or your brand?  In the Old Media World, you only had to wait out a news cycle and then most people would never remember that negative piece about you or your brand.  In the New Media World, many high-profile people and brands are increasingly plagued by high-ranking negative items in the search engine results…and these search results can last for a long, long time.  So, how does one defend themself or their brand from these negative items? It’s called Online Reputation Management and it’s time you started looking out for yourself.

Before we discuss specific tactics, some history:

• One of the oldest examples would be President George W. Bush’s bio page on whitehouse.gov ranking for [miserable failure] thanks to hundreds of bloggers Google Bombing (linking to him with “miserable failure” in the text of the link) him.  Google claims to have rolled out a filter to eliminate the Google Bombings, but I’m not so sure I buy that based on a few queries I watch.  Your name is probably a lot less competitive than the President’s, so it’s not going to be too tough for some pissed off bloggers to change the searching public’s view about you.  Just ask Dave Pasternack.
• Another example is Kobe Bryant.  His PR agencies and those of his endorsers like Nike have spent millions to change the public perception after his trip to Colorado.  Look at the Google results for [kobe bryant].  Pushing that Smoking Gun police report to Page 2 would help.
• You’d think that something as saucy and well-branded as Victoria’s Secret would be free from negative search results, right?  Check out Victoria’s Dirty Secret in their brand name results.
• How many millions of dollars did Dell lose from “Dell Hell” results being prominent in their search results before they became proactive with their reputation management?  In the B2B and consumer technology world’s, your search results are crucial as buyers will often spend up to six months doing research in a “consideration phase” before opening their wallets.

Now, if you follow the advice below, you won’t be able to own all 1000 results in Google.  That’s ok.  You really only want to own the first page.  Most searchers never make it to Page 2 and most only look at the top 5 results.  Some 15% only look at the first result.  So, a little work will go a very long way in protecting yourself.

Without further adieu…and, yes, I realize this could also be titled, “12 Ways to F With Somebody’s Search Results“, here are twelve ways to proactively manage your Online Reputation Management:

1.  Do the Right Thing.
The smartest thing you can do is to squash the problem before somebody feels the need go online and launch SCUD’s at you.  In this age where it takes my blind grandmother five minutes to set up a Wordpress blog, customer service and defusing PR time bombs is more important than ever.  So, eat some shit if you have to and keep it offline.

2.  Parasitic SEO.
Search engines love trusted website domains with lots of reputation, so take advantage of the ability rank your content on other websites. Spammers have been doing this for nearly a decade because it’s very, very effective. Myspace, Squidoo, Typepad, Blogspot, ClaimID, Facebook…these are all high-authority domains where you can defend your name or your brand.  Thanks to the Web 2.0 movement, there are literally a hundred easy places to create a community profile or message that will rank authoritatively.

3.  Wikipedia.
Google loves Wikipedia like I love Jessica Alba. If your name or brand qualifies as Wikipedia’s definition of citation-worthiness, you need to start a Wikipedia page.  You want to do this before somebody else gets in there and creates it for you.  Ask Fuzzy Zoeller.

4.  PPC.
Affiliate marketers and search arbitragers know that brand name searches convert the highest. So, make sure you occupy the top paid search listing for your name, brand name, or product name so competitors can’t take advantage of that quality traffic.  In theory, it should be a lot easier for you to create a higher Quality Score for your brand than anyone else.  Disregard that thought, though, if you are part of a growing faction of search marketers that believe “Quality Score” is Google’s biggest lever in meeting its number for Wall Street.

5.  Subdomains.
Search engines generally look at subdomains as unique domains. The creation of subdomains off your main domain will allow you to generate increased listings in the search results.  Take a look at search results for [google], [microsoft], [yahoo], and [craigslist].  Don’t go the route of “subdomain SPAM” or creating duplicate content, but you may want to create subdomains like “blog.domain.com”, “about.domain.com”, “forums.domain.com”, etc. where a valid segregation of content exists.

6.  Pre-Sell or Article Pages.
Here’s another page out of the Spammer’s Playbook.  There are many authoritative domain owners out there that need money.  If you can work out a deal to host content on their site, it will probably rank.  I won’t out any specific examples of this, but it would look like www.domain.com/subdirectory/yourname/.  Hypothetically speaking, go find some students with juicy .edu pages to write a “feature” or “interview” of you.

7.  Domain Names.
If you are a prominent person or brand, chances are many people will skip search engines altogether and type in a domain name.  Make sure you own yourname.com or yourbrand.com along with the other major .tld domain name extensions.  I can tell you that Google loves exact name domain names, so it’s not really hard to rank a .net, .org, or even a .info these days.  If you are a really big brand, you’ll probably want to purchase yourbrandsucks.com, too, to take that opportunity off the table.  If you find that somebody else owns a domain name involving your registered trademark, you should pursue all legal means (see below) available to you to recapture it.

8.  Authoritative Blogger Reviews.
Due to the nature of blogging and community citations, there are probably a handful of popular blogs in your market that rank well for a variety of your topics.  Reach out to the blog authors to write about you.  If you run into a brick wall and can’t get anyone to write about you, don’t worry, a new market has emerged in the world of of paid blogging.  You can go to places like ReviewMe or PayPerPost and pay bloggers to talk about you, your brand, or your products.  If you choose authoritative blogs, chances are those pages will rank pretty highly and many of their “fanboys” will also blog about you, too.

9.  Legal means.
I’m not going to lie to you.  Trademark and copyright enforcement on the Internet is an uphill battle, but if you aren’t active in defending yourself, the low barriers to entry in creating negative brand equity via the Web will make you an attractive target.  If somebody is clearly infringing upon your copyright, file a DMCA request with Google.  If you have a domain name trademark problem, see ICANN’s Domain Dispute Resolution Policy for relatively cheap enforcement.

10.  Additional Websites.
In most small brand reputation management engagements I have consulted on, this is always the first card the business owner wants to play…creating a few more websites for their company.  At first blush to the Internet Newb, that seems like an easy and cost-effective thing to do.  Unfortunately for the average small business, they aren’t globally popular enough to generate the links and awareness to rank multiple sites.  It can also take a small business up to a year to generate enough trust to get through search engine ranking filters.  On the other hand, if you are a big brand or have deep pockets like Dell (see results), this is a very viable strategy in garnering those all-important first page listings.

11.  Make Sure Your House Is In Order.
These days, Basic On-Page SEO is pretty easy.  Most content management systems create efficient, crawlable architectures for search engines to correctly follow and interpret.  If you are using an old, outdated CMS that creates a lot of duplicate content or uncrawlable URL’s, the overal trust and authority for your website is being diluted.  The major search engines also tend to treat the www and non-www versions of your site (canonical url issue) as separate sites in terms of reputation scoring.  So, make sure you redirect one to the other so you aren’t splitting the ability for your content to rank.  Ensuring that your site is tuned up as best it can be to rank for its own identity is imperative for a million other reasons than Reputation Management, so stop putting this off.

12.  Monitoring.
Time to let you in on what I think is a growing scam market.  Most of the high dollar Reputation Management services out there today are really nothing more than Reputation Monitoring services.  They will charge you an arm and a leg to tell you that you have a problem, but very few will actually help you fix it.  The good news is that you can replicate much of their radar screen simply by signing up for Google Alerts and watching the major blog search services like Technorati and Google Blog Search.  If one of these services tells you differently, ask them why, if they’ve crawled the entire Internet, they didn’t go the much more profitable route of being a search engine.

Maybe the most important thing to take away from all of this is that you have to be proactive.  None of these are overnight fixes so, if you wait until you have a problem, you are going to be taking some unnecessary incoming fire.

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