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May 15, 2008
How to Bury Negative Online Mentions of You - Intermediate Level Tactics
Yesterday I published a post on the Search Engine People site titled 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company!.
While the tactics mentioned may be enough to push some negative online mentions of you or your business to the second page of the search results or lower, in other cases they will not. The question then becomes; what else can you do when the initial tactics themselves aren't enough, and you've got a negative piece about you ranking in the search results for an important phrase. Burying your head in the sand and hoping it goes away isn't really a viable option. The answer ... LOTS can be done!
Lets start with our goals ... they're progressive.
Progressive Goals:
Goal #1: First ... bump the listing below the fold asap
then
Goal #2: Bump the listing off the first page of the search results for the given term(s)
With goals in hand, we can now consider tactics.
Tactics:
To Achieve Goal #1:
a. select the strongest 3-5 of those 50+ sites, where strong is a subjective assessment based on many factors. My personal assessment would be:
1. Digg
2. Twitter
3. Stumbleupon
4. MyBlogLog
5. Linkedin
b. establish a profile on each, where the profile name is the term/phrase the negative piece ranks for
c. get lots of friends on each of those sites ... the more the better. It works best if you take an active role and participate. Each friend will result in an internal link back to your profile on that site, making it stronger.
d. within each site, you can see which profiles are the strongest in the offending engines' eyes ... the search engines themselves with rank them in order of importance given a simple search query (eg. site:twitter.com). Try to secure links from the strongest profiles first ... they pass the most value.
e. join groups where possible too ... often these will pass link power to your profile as well.
f. possibly create a social profiles menu on your site(s), and link to each of these profiles.
To Achieve Goal #2:
a. determine how far down you actually wish to push the piece. Beyond the first page will take a great deal of time and energy.
b. assuming you've already bumped the offending post below the fold, you need to select the number of sites you will need to use from the 50 + listed in the 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company! article.
c. follow the steps outlined above for each
d. within each (where possible) include links to all your other profiles on the other sites
Following these steps should be enough to push most negative mentions to the second page. If not, or if you don't have the time and energy, do engage the services of a professional with experience in the space. Aside from the obvious value ... its not a bad idea to take out profiles under your name anyway, just as a pre-emptive measure.
Please note ... these tactics are by no means comprehensive or advanced. They're just a relatively quick and efficient means for burying negative online mentions. Much more advanced tactics exist, which I will not delve into here.
Other great reference posts about reputation management include:
Glen Allsopp - What Is Online Reputation Management
Andy Beal - Free Online Reputation Management Beginner's Guide
Todd Malicoat - Reputation Management Emancipation PRoclamation - 10 Ways to Own Yourself Online
Lee Odden - Basics of Online Reputation Management
Marty Weintraub - 9 Essential Tactics for Reputation Management in Social Media
Andy Beal - Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools
David Wallace - Using Social Media to Help Manage Online Reputation
Posted by on May 15, 2008 11:00 AM
Comments
Marty May 15, 2008 10:37 PM
I just saw this post and wanted to add that a very effective (maybe "advanced") way to achieve these goals is to create an article and distribute it to article directories. In this way, you will get the article syndicated on many autoblogs. These blogs are usually not useful for SEO, as they publish only a snippet of the article (with not link), but they are great for ORM because they mention your name on each post and they create a separate "author profile" page with your name. Of course, make sure to use your own name as the Author Name.
Jacob August 6, 2008 10:34 AM
Actually the division into two progressive goals seems rather superficial as the main goal is one and the same: to remove junk or negative comments from the first page.
Jacob Bogatin August 29, 2008 8:48 AM
Great article with some fantastic tips. Not too much of this around these days.
Any suggestions for bumping off articles on news sites that are dominating the serps? They often have age and PR which can be difficult to bump under any sort of timeline without appearing spammy.
Cheers
Michael_Moodie April 18, 2009 10:11 AM
Great article! I would also like to suggest using Reputation-Technologies.com - http://www.reputation-technologies.com/ which is an online reputation management business that consists of public relations practitioners, legal professionals, search engine optimization (SEO) specialists and writers to ensure that any search for your name will bring back only positive links on the first few pages of Google.
RJ December 11, 2009 2:47 PM
Jeff, This is an excellent primer for anyone dealing with the nastys. The bottom line is that it's a shoot out. May he or she with the best linking structure win.