Guarding Your Reputation
As with anything in life, taking precautions to protect your reputation before there’s an attack makes the most sense. However, we all know how easy it is to get complacent so that when an individual or group attacks us, we’re taken completely off-guard.
There is no one thing you can do to practice proactive reputation management yourself. Rather it’s a process:
- Be nice when you deal with people online
- Never publish an attack against another individual/group–be sure those chickens will come home to roost
- In business, take great care that you give your customers their money’s worth: it’s no secret that the vast majority of reputation management problems are actually well deserved.
- Stay away from ‘undesirables.’ You can damage your reputation by association really easily online.
Don’t Panic–SEOclass.org Has Answers!
Most website owners tend to panic when they realize there are unflattering or even downright aggressive web pages about them published on the Web. It’s a fact of human nature that we’re morbidly attracted to the negative, so it’s no real surprise that bad news tends to rise to the top of a search pretty quickly.
But what can we do about it? First you need to address the problem if there is one:
- If there is substance to accusations, fix it fast. Don’t quibble: the best chance you have of getting negative commentary removed from the Web is to remove the reason for it.
- Once you have addressed the problem make sure you get your side of the story out: tell everyone you’ve fixed it. On your website, on forums, social media platforms and wherever else you can think of.
- Issue a press release citing your actions. If you don’t know how to do it properly–ask a professional.
The trick is to introduce as much positive information about your brand, from as many different sources as possible in the shortest time frame you can manage.
This is a mighty tall order for most of us. But SEOclass specializes in creating flattering, legitimate Web pages that will push down those nasty pages within a matter of days–weeks at most.
If you don’t employ a professional for anything else online, you will need one for effective reputation management if you run into trouble. This is no time to think about saving pennies: bad branding can cost you your business!