subject: Search Engines Do Not Care About Your Internet Reputation - Written By Anderson Pratt [print this page] One angry customer could ruin your online reputation. In fact, it may not even be a customer maliciously attacking your business online. We see this type of activity happen all too often to reputable businesses across the nation. The motivation of this kind of activity is often the effort of other webmasters and bloggers to funnel your traffic to their blog or website by using your company name. You will often see sneaky under handed webmasters adding words like scam or fraud or alert next to your business name in an effort to entice people to click their search engine entry over your own business website. The businesses that suffer the most from this kind of malicious activity are the businesses that do large offline marketing campaigns like mass mailers.
Often times these bloggers and webmasters are well aware of these companys large offline marketing campaigns and sit waiting patiently to funnel the respective companys traffic that will inevitably end up online to research the flyer they received in the mail. Meanwhile, Google and other search engines not only allow this kind activity and spamming, but they tend to rank these kinds of slander very high in their index. Whats worse, the people participating in this activity are not even your customers or clients and often write fake reviews that are not in your favor. Amazingly enough its not just the small spam blogs doing these dirty deeds, but a lot of larger well known websites and blogs participate in this behavior as well to bring in extra revenue through their Google Adsense accounts. The names for this kind of activity can be defined as spamming or trolling, and is clearly just an effort to capitalize on another companys name and hard work.
Now that I have explained these kinds of activities and the motivation behind them, its up to you to be proactive and protect your online reputation. The methods involved in protecting your online reputation are search engine optimization (SEO) and many forms of guerilla marketing including article marketing, submitting press releases regularly, social networking, and video marketing. Another often over looked problem is bad on page search engine optimization. This can cause your own website to rank below bad entries in the search engines for your own business name. Needless to say, this is less than desirable and not something that should ever happen if you have implemented proper SEO techniques.
The conclusion of this article is that your marketing efforts whether they are offline or online will always have some impact on the online community. Its up to you to be proactive and make sure the chatter showing up on page one of Google are in your favor.
