Before you start managing your online reputation, you have to ascertain where you stand on the internet.
Type your names in all major search engines and see what results you get. Set up search alerts for your name and the name of your company.
If something negative appears in the results, your online reputation can quickly damage both your offline and online reputation — and seriously affect your business.
While you might not be able to remove damaging content from the Internet, there is every chance that you can minimize its impact using simple SEO techniques.
If you find something defamatory, research how it happened. For instance, photos from your Flickr account may be showing up in search results for your name. If you do not desire your photo appearing, you can simply delete the photos and readjust your privacy settings.
If someone mischievously posts sensitive information like your social security number, bank account number, credit card number or an image of your handwritten signature, major search engines like Google will take steps to delete them from search results.
Your best bet for minimizing the visibility of negative content is to suppress them from top search results using positive content. You can try to reduce the visibility of negative comments in the search results by proactively publishing interesting and informative quality positive content about yourself or your business.
If you want to make negative or bad reviews appear in the third or fourth pages of search results, you will need to create positive content of relevance to push the negative links down.
You can persuade some of your happy customers to post positive reviews about your business. If the internet is flooded with positive reviews abut your business, the stray bad reviews will automatically get relegated to lower pages in search results.
Profiles on major social networks are powerful tools for pushing positive reviews to the first page of search results. Results from large sites like Facebook, Twitter and LnkedIn often carry great SEO power than a single post or something derogatory in a personal blog.
One guaranteed formula for pushing your positive online presence further up in search results is to make a hub that links to all of your content.