First Steps in Online Reputation Management
Many people are happily going about their business without ever worrying about online reputation management. The problem comes when, one day, they perform a search on their name, their brand, or their company name, and find something in the search results that they’d rather not see.
Sometimes, it’s just piles and piles of spammy sites that have nothing to do with them. Other times, it’s someone out to make them look bad, whether that’s a competitor, disgruntled employee, or jilted ex-boyfriend.
When it happens, it’s usually pretty confusing. I’ve gotten several emails that follow this basic outline:
Dear Kevin,
I ran a search for [my name/my company/my brand], and came up with several sites that shouldn’t be there. I’ve emailed Google asking them to remove those pages, but I haven’t gotten a response. How can I get Google to make those pages go away?
Sincerely,
Online Reputation Victim
I have to write them back, and let them know there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that Google is going to remove anything from their index. But thankfully, there is something else they can do: replace those junk results with more relevant results, controlled by them.
Taking control of your search results is the first step toward online reputation management. For individuals and companies that are free from scandal, it may be all they need to do for a long time.
For individuals, the easiest way to accomplish this is to create a website or a blog on your own domain name, such as www.kevinnewcomb.com. Once that’s done, you can link to that domain from all of your soon-to-be-created social media profiles, and link to those profiles from your site.
There are an infinite number of sites where you can create a profile, but some of the best-ranking ones include:
It helps to use your full name when creating these profiles, and to fill out the profiles completely. If there’s an option to allow search engines to find the profile, make sure that’s turned on. And if there’s a place to link to your web site or other social media profiles, take advantage of that too.
Of course, there are plenty of benefits to participating in some of those communities as well, but I’ll address some of those in another post.