Get A Good Reputation For Your Business

Posted by Online Reputation Handbook

March 6, 2010

The internet is like a massive public library of information. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have made it ridiculously easy to discover anything you want about any person or company. This is really beneficial and extremely convenient, of course, but there are also new problems that occur. If anything bad about you or your company gets out on the internet, then search engines are going to pick it up, and people are going to see it when they search. Unfortunately, it is ridiculously simple and easy for anyone (competitors, customers, ex-employers etc) to seriously damage a companies online reputation that they may have built up. With this in mind, it was clear that a solution was needed.

In response to these problems, many companies and SEO firms came out offering reputation management services. You must realize though that it is very, very difficult to entirely get rid of results from search engines - and Google isn’t going to care if they are indexing pages that damage your business. Many sites that people use to post slanderous material (like ripoffreport and complaintsboard) explicitly state that they do not remove content, ever, under any circumstances. You can see why there are many people who feel sites like ripoffreport and complaintsboard are a terrible idea, seeing as how anyone can use them to ruin a business or individual anonymously. So bearing in mind the fact that it’s often near impossible to entirely eliminate negative results, then what can actually be done? The way these reputation management companies help you out is by knocking down any pages you don’t want out of the first page of results. When this is done, the 1st page of results of Google (listing ten different pages) will only contain positive, beneficial content. Searches will still come across the negative pages if they click through the results pages. But, according to various research and data, it is rare for users to look past the first page of results when searching for something. And by having a lot more results saying good things about your company, it makes it far more likely for customers to feel comfortable doing business with you.

By now, I am sure you are wondering what firms are worth contacting if you have reputation management issues. Well, recently I have heard good things about RepSpinner. Without doubt RepSpinner is far cheaper than the majority of other reputation management companies, and they are able to get things done quickly according to most of the reports I have seen. Easy jobs can often be done for under $1000. But if your project is especially difficult (with a lot of results for your term in Google) then it can take a long time. The best way to do it is to contact as many companies as you can find. If possible, have an agreement where you only pay when you see results. You’ll find that most firms will tell you they can’t work under these conditions and that’s because they usually take your money for nothing. But companies that do agree that you pay them only after you see results are the one’s worth dealing with.

By the way, if you are going with RepSpinner, it is worth noting that they have a number of other services related to reputation management. They are very good at doing brand building for new online businesses (this is where a reputation and new pages are built to appear in google).

Internet