Miranda Jacobs - 2010-07-31
Google allows anyone to research anything quickly and easily,
therefore it is important to know how to manage your reputation online. With websites
such as ciao.co.uk, blagger.com and various forums and blogs being favoured by Google
because of their regular content, tackling the problem isn't easy.
Online Reputation management is a common issue online at the moment, as web based
businesses search for customers to form a profitable business. As a result any bad
publicity online can affect your rating and performance. Most people perform searched
and it is important to ensure that when a customer Google's your brand they get nothing
but positive listings and glowing reviews.
One thing to bear in mind is that online reputation management is not as easy at it may
seem, and there are many errors that can be made along the way. Here are a few basic
mistakes in reputation management.
Fake user accounts on reviews websites
There are review websites such as e-customer-review and blagger.com that allow users to
review websites, products and services. They do get ranks and a search on google will
bring up a front page listing for one of these sites.
It can be tempting make your own account and give feedback for your own company,
anonymously of course. When businesses do this it rarely works as the 'positive' reviews
they leave for their own company tend to be left the day the user account has been
created (which is obviously suspicious), is one of the only positive reviews on the page
and is generally the only review that user account has done.
Comments on blogs
Blogs are written, and are favoured by Google because it provides content for searches .
Furthermore, when comments are written on blogs, the blog post itself is kept fresh with
content, which ensures that Google spiders it more frequently and ranks it higher. When
you have a negative blog post about your company or website, it is best not to post a
comment defending your company becuase:
* It adds content to the negative reviews and boosts the rankings
* It can lead to more feedback comments that may be detrimental to your business
reputation
You are able to spot a company that has done this because they'll have a lot of reviews
giving them negative reviews and terrible feedback, and then several reviews giving them
9/10 or better, with great feedback. Just as with posting comments on blogs, the more
fake reviews you add, the more content is added to the reviews page, the more links that
are generated to the reviews page (from your fake user account profiles) and the better
the negative reviews rank in Google.
Building your own reviews website
In order to do this, it needs to be done correctly. You may want to make sure that the
website is hosted on a different server to yours, registered to a different company, and
features unbiased reviews of all of your competitors. For example a reviews website for
your business that gives competitors bad comments would be unacceptable (except for you
of course). Once it is hosted on your server will quickly be identified and could damage
your online reputation.
Reputation management requires experties and a subtle approach. When done right however,
it's one of the most effective forms of online marketing.
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