How to Protect Your Reputation on Google

by Suemagazine

A client is upset with you.  So she takes to the Internet and blasts away.  Not only does this hurt your business, not to mention what it does to your feelings, but you feel powerless as this disgruntled wacko starts posting to as many Internet possibilites as she can. 

What do you do?  According to Jerry Work who writes the blog, "Law Firm Internet Marketing", you need to bury the bad stuff.  In his blog post on TalentZoo.com, Work gives some sage advice:
   "If there is negative information about your company online that appears high in search engine rankings for searches of your company...well, that's bad news.  We're not talking about some touchy, feely image/branding problem; we're talking about a full-blown lost customers, lost revenue kind of problem.  If a search of your company's name brings up negative information, you need to take action NOW."  

The first thing you do is to counteract the negativity with positive information about you or your firm.  Next, you need to get rid of the negativity.  How do you do that?  By beating the heck out of it.  

You've got to push those negative search engine results down to the second page of search results or lower.  If you get them to the third page, they will be practicially invisible, except to the diehards.  Just getting them to the second page, according to Work, makes a huge difference in the number of people who will see and click on search results negative to your firm.

Apparently, you have to create lots of web pages optimized for the keywords that are showing the negative information, and then do the things necessary to get those pages to rank higher than the negative pages.  Sound tricky?  It is.  How many pages you need depends on how many keywords you're trying to clean up and how highly ranked the negative content is.  Good news, though!  For most companies, there are far fewer competing web sites for searches of their company name than for more generic searches. 

Work has come up with a formula as to what you need in terms of how many web pages you need to depress a negative search listing.  While every situation is different, he has a couple of different formulas that can be used to derive a pretty good estimate of number of pages you need.

So what are new clients and maintaining old ones worth to you, particularly in a ravaging recession?  Yep.  Better get to this project now.