The biggest liabilities against your reputation will come from the first page results of the three major search engines, being Yahoo, Google, and Bing. If anything negative about you is found on the first page of either of those search engines, there will be an immediate impact on your reputation. Unfortunately, it now takes less than a minute for people to submit something negative online and for the world to be able to see it. Thankfully, you can enlist the services of a reputation management agency to help you should your good name be under attack.
Sites that Don’t Remove Negative Comments
Some website are quite open to communication. This means that you can contact them and ask them to remove anything negative, particularly if the details are untrue, if the situation has been resolved, or if the information was posted in a defamatory Manor. However, there are websites that will simply refuse to remove these types of comments, at which point you need different strategies that reputation management agencies can provide you with.
What a Reputation Management Agency Will Do
The first thing is agencies will do is create a wealth of positive information about you. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that at least the entire first page of Google is dedicated to positive results if people look you up. Some ways to do this is by creating numerous microsites and optimizing them, ensuring that your company profiles are consistent, sending out optimistic press releases, and engaging in a social media campaign.
Once they have created all the positive information, they will get to work on actually promoting it. You must be realistic in terms of your expectations, as this usually takes between 6 and 12 weeks before showing any kind of result. Unfortunately, there is very little that can be done to speed this up while at the same time and gauging in white hat tactics. Those are the strategies that are accepted according to the terms and conditions of the different search engines. While black hat tactics, which are the opposite, will provide you with fast results, the search engines will find out about it and the penalties can be severe. In fact, you may find that your website will be banned from the search engines for life, which would result in only the negative still being visible.
Exactly how long it will take for your reputation to recover depends on a number of different factors. This includes the ranking of the negative listing, the number of negative listings that are there, how popular your name or brand was before the attack, how important and popular the url’s of the negative information are, how much people are commenting on the negative remarks, and other activities on the host of the negative remarks. Do remember, however, that it is possible to recover if you are patient and make a commitment to being proactive about maintaining a positive reputation.
