There are millions of website and blogs out there that are full of both good and bad information. Anyone can create a simple blog and start talking about anything they like or dislike. This can lead a lot of false information and potentially harmful misrepresentation of your company. Web sites have emerged to expose bad dates and insult company representatives. These pages are certainly not what you want potential clients to see if they Google you. If maintaining a good name for yourself on the internet is important to you, you need to take a proactive approach to ensuring that the right information is out there.
One way to track what search engines know about your brand is to set up various Google Alerts. By subscribing to a Google Alert you will receive an email as soon as your search phrase (like your name or company) enters Google’s index. Google Alerts cover news stories, video comments, blogs, pages found in web search, and even Google’s own mailing lists, Google Groups. Popular search terms will give you a lot of results so make sure your keywords are targeted. If you do receive an alert about negative news or information about your company, you need to take action in order to remove or obscure this harmful site. In order to remove negative information, you need to try to generate a disproportionate amount of positive web sites, pages and content with your name attached. This process can take roughly 4-6 months depending on the situation.
Once there is negative information published about your site, you need to have a long term Online Reputation Management (ORM) plan laid out. You must constantly monitor and analyze your Google search results and take action to counter all of the negative online PR by producing a disproportionate amount of positive content thereby crowding out the negative PR across all types of online media platforms.
