Author: Rob Sullivan 

Over the past few articles I’ve brought you different tactics you can use to help build quality links to your site.And while I am going to continue to bring you even more of these tactics I thought it would be good to step back and take a big picture look at why link building is important.Further, I wanted to look at other things you should be considering when you are doing your link building: Namely managing your online reputation.

As the web evolves, reputation management becomes even more critical to your online business. This is because many people will form their opinion of your or your business based on the sites found around you.

An upset former customer can do a whole lot more damage to your reputation online that you may suspect. If they are a popular blogger, for example, and are able to call on their network of sites to help promote their negative view of you, it can have a detrimental impact on your search rankings.

This is because they can use a tactic called link bombing to rank higher than you for your name or the name of your company.

What do you mean links can be bad?

Just like how you need to build links to improve your link popularity and ultimately search engine rankings, links from other sites can work against you.

Let me give you a practical example:

If you do a search on Google for “miserable failure” or “failure” you will see that President George Bush’s White House bio is ranked number one. This is an example of many thousands of sites linking to the site’s bio page, with the anchor text “miserable failure” and “failure” in them. Google then counts these links as votes for the site for that phrase. Since the site receives the most votes it ranks the highest.

But this is just one example of using links to negatively influence search rankings. There is another where personal sites and blogs have used similar linking strategies to outrank corporate websites for negative terms.

I once talked to an attorney who was ranked #2 for his own name behind a blog site which went on about how terrible an attorney he was and how you shouldn’t hire him.

The blog site took advantage of the system by requesting links on the attorneys name from other bloggers, thus moving it ahead of the attorney’s own site.

It is this type of tactic which can be used against you because in this case, short of legal action, the attorney would have to build even more links to his site for his name than the negative blog.

In the mean time, however, the blogger continues receiving links as other sites which link to him now request the same links. It becomes a snowball effect. One link leads to three, which leads to ten, then a hundred, then 500 then 1,000 and so on.

That is the real power of blogging – the ability to quickly build links back to your site on virtually any phrase you chose to target.

And since bloggers have that much pull, they can (and in many cases do) use that ability against you.

But it doesn’t have to be just bloggers that do that. Any site that has the pull can post a derogatory page about you and flood the web with backlinks, through submissions to thousands of directories and other sites which don’t check for quality and will accept automated submissions.

And the kicker of this is, by the time you realize it has happened to you, it’s almost too late.

That’s because those links were submitted months ago and have passed Google’s aging policy. The only way you can combat this is to build a similar number of positive links and wait the same time until Google approves the links and adds them to your link inventory.

As you can imagine that can take some time so in the meantime your site suffers because of these negative tactics which were begun months ago.

So how you do combat negative links?

There is no real way to combat them. Once they are there they pretty much exist forever. The only real strategy is to ensure that you continue to build high quality relevant links to your site. Thus, you are essentially taking preventative action against those who may not have your best interests at heart.

That means using the tactics I’ve described in some of the recent articles, and continuing to monitor your link popularity.

It also doesn’t hurt to subscribe to services like Google Alerts. I use this to monitor a variety of keywords both in the news and in the organic rankings.

You could create an alert for your name and receive emails whenever there is a mention of your name – either through the news, or when a site begins to move in the organic rankings.

Then you can monitor a few sites to ensure that nothing magically appears ahead of you that is negative in nature.

And if you do find a negative site that appears on Google’s radar, at least you can take a somewhat proactive stance and begin building positive links at an increased rate, to keep them down in the rankings, and solidifying your position.

Summary

I don’t want to scare you with this. It’s not something that is rampant on the web. In fact, the average person has no idea how to “trash” you online, other than perhaps posting a negative comment on your website (if you allow commenting).

All I wanted to do with this article was to let you know that such individuals do exist. And they do have the power to supplant your positive online image with a negative review of you even if it is untrue.

But if you follow the rules of good link building you can help prevent such attacks from happening to you.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management involves both marketing and public relations along with search engine marketing. Visibility and high search engine indexing with good publicity which displaces negative publicity is the goal. This results in a increase in positive web presence, helping you own top spots in search engine rankings. Online Reputation Management enables you to protect and manage your reputation becoming actively involved in the outcome of search engine results.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

Cincinnati Enquirer - Facebook prank turns bad - December 21, 2007

ComputerWorld - Online reputations under threat - December 7, 2007

Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace - Washington Post - October 27, 2007

Philadelphia Inquirer - New web site is not fair to doctors - October 15, 2007

Washington Post - Ten Ways to Generate Good Web PR - October 10, 2007

Dealing with the Damage from Online Critics - New York Times - October 4, 2007

Office gossip has never traveled faster, ‘thanks’ to tech - USA Today - September 9, 2007

Defending Wikipedia’s Impolite Side - NY Times - August 20, 2007

The Saboteurs Of Search - Forbes.com June 6, 2007

USA Today - Your Internet Image is Everything - USA Today - April 5, 2007

Trash Talk
- Wall Street Journal - March 19, 2007

Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web - Washington Post - March 7, 2007

Your past is lurking online - Boston Globe - Feb 25, 2007

Internet Defamation can carry a Big Price Tag - Asian Tribune - October 12, 2006

Delaware Supreme Court Declines to Unmask a Blogger - New York Times - October 10, 2006

Harsh words Die Hard on the Web - Washington Post - March 6, 2006

Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia’s free world - Boston Globe - Feb 12, 2006

Hotel Reviews Online: In Bed with Hope, Half-Truths and Hype - New York Times - Feb 7, 2006

Delaware Supreme Court Declines to Unmask a Blogger - NY Times - October 6, 2005

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management

by Apogee Search
Even after many years of untainted business practices, a single negative event can stain your brand image in the public eye for a long time. Simple things like a negative product review in a blog can be harmful to your brand, especially when competitors are standing close by to snatch up customers. One way to combat that threat is through a reputation management strategy, which can begin with search engine optimization (SEO).First, to understand how negative press can get to the top of the search engines results pages (SERPs), let’s reminisce and revisit the old urban legend of Pop Rocks and Coke. Amidst all the excitement around the popular fizzy candy, in the late seventies, stories began to spread around school playgrounds that, when mixed with soda, Pop Rocks could cause a mini-explosion in your stomach. Teachers overheard and passed on to mothers. The worried mothers then escalated the news to the press, and soon General Foods, the creators of Pop Rocks, had a reputation problem on their hands.

This telephone game of word-of-mouth is replicated online via link-building. First, someone publishes negative comments about your business. As others read the comments, more people start linking to it in blogs and discussion groups. Friends forward to friends, who forward to friends and so on. Next thing you know, the bad press is at the top of the search rankings.

Back in the Pop Rocks days, General Foods responded to the Pop Rocks fiasco with full-page print ads, letters to school principals around the country, and even sent the Pop Rocks inventor door to door to attest to its safety. But what could they have done had they lived in the today’s digital world?

Begin by Analyzing Keywords

If an online reputation disaster strikes you or a friend, the first step in the repair strategy should always entail keyword selection. You don’t want to continue optimizing the same keywords that are used for existing marketing purposes. Different keywords come into play in this case. Negative press usually appears when consumers search for your product or brand name, so focus your SEO efforts on company-specific keywords. The goal is to drive brand-friendly results up in the SERPs, while pushing the unfriendly press down.

You do this by creating more good press and optimizing around those selected keywords. Links embedded within press releases will give sites a ranking boost while the news is fresh and the press release is at the top of the newswire. When you’re embedding the links, don’t just hyperlink your top level domain every time. Instead, ask yourself, “Which links are most important to our situation at this time?”

Experiment with different hyperlinks to different pages and sub-domains of the site, and measure the results to determine which ones will drive your news up the ranks. Always make sure that links are embedded on top of, or near, your brand name.

Bury Negative Press through Link Building

The second step is link building. After all, if the negative press elbowed its way to the top of the SERPs through link building, you can do the same with positive press. It is an SEO ace in the hole, and it should be a major part of any SEO strategy. To counteract the negative press, build links to optimize brand and product names.

Think outside your corporate domain. Sub-domains, including news sites, corporate blogs and other pages outside your website, can be key SEO weapons in your arsenal as they take up more shelf space in the SERPs. Optimize these through link building, and make it a practice to ensure that the content on these sites is constantly updated and is as fresh as possible.

Lastly, go directly to the source of the negative press and request they also include rebuttal links. Ideally, they will publish another link on that post or page to your response (on your site) to the issue in question so that your positive messages are readily visible.

When it comes to the Internet, information is a constantly flowing stream, and it flows rapidly. The only real news is what’s up at the top of the results page, so use something that you know works to manage, control and shape those messages that you care about. SEO has a pivotal role in reputation management, as it can remove negatives and enhance positives on the first page of results, which is usually the only page that matters.

International Online Reputation Online Reputation Management