How to do reputation management
Recently we have had to do a job cleaning the listings for a client who had had a abusive blog post written about him that appeared directly under his name when ever anyone searched for him. I though I would take this opportunity to write an guide on how we did it. So this is my guide to reputation management.
Step 1: Create as many positive pages as possible on high trust websites.
The first thing to do is create pages that you would want to be seen in the rankings. The key to doing this job quickly is to use the highly trusted website where a page that just has the words in the title tag will feature highly in the search engines. To do this
• Do press releases. (for free use www.PR-Inside.com if you can afford the $300 or so go for www.prweb.com the syndication is far better)
• Syndicate articles (publish the article to 10 or so site then the strongest will get picked up)
• Set up a profile on every social bookmarking site you can come across (facebook, twitter, myspace, squidoo, hubpages…)
• Ask/pay people for guest article on trusted blogs.
• Release a video to every video website you can. (I suggest you use www.tubemogul.com to get the videos out)
• Create a three or 4 page blog around the name on all free blogging platforms (Blogger, typepad, Wordpress…)
Step 2: Create your own websites.
Now this is an optional but it helps a lot especially if the search term is fairly competitive. Buy up domain name with the words in the domain name and then build a small website on them. Building a small niche website dedicated to the specific topic in hand with you can add good content to and build links has a really good chance of ranking very highly therefore pushing the unwanted results further down the listings.
Step 3: Link build
After you have got to this point you want to start picking the listing which you want to rise up. These you should start link building for, build links with the search terms that you want to rank on in the anchor text. So for example say you wanted to clean the ranking for the term “Mr big bucks”, and undesirable news report was in position 4 then you would want to build links to the result in position 5,6,7,8,9,10 and 11 at the very least. These links would really want to have the anchor text “My big bucks” or something very similar.
You need to then just keep building links this is the long part.
A couple of useful notes:
1. Over shot
If you need to move it off the first place aim to move it off the first 3. If you do just enough the chances are it won’t be enough. The google algorithm is a tricky thing, it might like some of your work but not other, I would really plan to do 3 times as much work as the minimum requires.
2. Don’t kick up a fuss
Do let anyone know and don’t tell the people that you are going to get them off the first page. You want them to forget about it and stop posting. If they actively start promoting that page, your screwed, for every one link they build you need to build one to every site you are optimising to show above them. Keep quite.
3. Check out their back links
If you are link building have a look through the backlinks to the site that link to the offending article. If you can get links from the same place not only are you boosting your sites ranking but you are hurting theirs, in a small way.