Online reputation statistics change regularly. This guide was last updated December 2019.

If you’re like many brand management professionals you might lie awake at night wondering when the next emergency will upset your well laid plans. We understand. The online reputation management world smolders with tales of tragedy, falls from grace, and salacious rumors that can destroy careers and entire businesses. As with any threat, a little knowledge can go a long way. These facts and statistics should help. 

What constitutes right and wrong behavior for online reputation management and public relations companies? It's similar to how ethics in the media are treated. There is a lot of confusion. We hope this article will help outline what really is, or is not, ethical in the online reputation management industry.

Originally published on 21 July 2019

Using "related searches" for a reputation management campaign may provide short-term improvement, but cause long-term problems by associating a client's brand with a negative query. Here's how to avoid that.

• Choose topics and search phrases with care
• Understand how Google deciphers the meaning of a web page
• Correct short term search phrases

There is a lot of apparently bad / old / inaccurate information out in the world about how to block archive.org, otherwise known as "The Wayback Machine" from scraping your site. This is the most accurate information we can find about it as of this writing. Spoiler alert: Internet Archive did remove our site once we asked, but the robots.txt method did not work. 

You can make Google ignore a web page, thereby making it "disappear" from search results, by adding a "noindex"meta tag to the HTML code of a single web page on your site. When Google crawls the page with the noindex tag on it the search engine will delete the page from search results. This method only works if you control the website and have access to the HTML code of a page.

Just because you write something doesn't mean it will rank well or be visible in search results. How an article is structured can make all the difference. This article outlines how to write an article both people and search engines will appreciate.

1. Publish on the right website
2. Choose the right title
3. Technical and psychological/clickbait headlines
4. The Description gets people to click
5. The first paragraph is important
6. Page length advice
7. Bullets and numbered lists (like this one)
8. How rich media increases dwell-time

If you're here, you probably know exactly why reputation's such a big deal in 2019. You want you or your company to have access to the best opportunities, and a bad reputation can prevent that. A great reputation will open doors to fantastic opportunities and (if you're a business) unhindered access to your ideal client base. Here are just a few other benefits of a good reputation:

• More business opportunities
• A better selection of prospective employees
• Higher company value
• Lower marketing costs

Why does it take six months for a website to rank? We get asked this quite a bit. For the most part, it's because there is a lag time of between 10 and 20 weeks before listings start to improve in search results. The exception to the rule is viral content—if users signal content is of superior value, and they do so quickly, search listings can improve in hours. Unfortunately, not every piece of content is going to go viral. Spammy, low-quality SEO can have a quick effect, but it tends to rapidly off again and will more often than not make things worse.

Are some PR agencies evil?

Yes. Some PR agencies specialize in destruction rather than enhancement of reputation. Some of these agencies work for governments or political parties, others are private contractors, all have a similar agenda: Lay false trails, generate fake news, and use social media to weaken or decimate rivals by manipulating public opinion for nefarious purpose.

Want to remove images from Google? Sometimes negative search results take the form of images. Most often negative images cannot be removed from the internet. When they can be removed it is usually from the blog post, mugshot site, or article on which they reside and they must be removed by the publisher. Google will remove some images from search results under certain circumstances, but it is rare. Here's what to do when an image cannot be removed from the source or from search results.