A search result audit is part of any reputation management plan, and can make your business better by revealing the strengths and weaknesses of your online brand as seen by your prospective customers. Warning: sometimes it can be a little scary. Search results can be an excellent tool for marketing, research, and development. But their utility goes far beyond into the realm of human intent, understanding, decisions and actions. Every page of search results tells you a story about your customer and what they’re really looking for. The trick is in seeing the intent behind the search results. 

If you’re musing about improving your online reputation, it might help to have an idea of the direction you’re going in. This brief guide can help you formulate a plan and take action.

Today there are least 18 different ways for a business to be seen in search results, and that doesn’t even count social channels. Different types of search results include Adwords at the top or bottom of the page, the Knowledge Panel, images, reviews, news, shopping, videos and of course normal blue link search results.

Negative content can damage a company or person worse than the author often realizes. Sometimes it can be taken down, other times it must be pushed down or suppressed. An online reputation suppression strategy works to move newly created, and existing positive search results, higher up in search engine results in order to move down or 'suppress' negative search results.

The further down you can push negative content, the less likely a reader is to see it. In fact, most people don't look further than the first page of Google search results anyway.

We have created a list of proven techniques to help keep your negative content where it belongs: several pages deep in Google search results. 

Sections

• Choosing the right strategy for negative content
• The case for removal
• Can search results be manipulated?
• What if bad content is really strong?

Sometimes online reputation projects don't work. There are a number of reasons for a project not working out but a few that stand out. The number one reason is a lack of SEO, but there are other reasons like a disconnect between reality and expectations too. It's also important to note that not all reputation management companies are actually what they say they are. 

Sometimes you need to invoke one law or another to support or attack a particular position. If we had a dollar for every time a politician claimed that “the law states this” or “the courts agree that,” well, we wouldn’t be in the web reputation management business. We’d be sitting on a beach somewhere.

The dirty little secret, though, is that the law—both written statute and decisions handed down by the courts, which are charged with interpreting statute—is often open to interpretation, especially when it’s relatively new and untested. Some of the body of online reputation law fits the “new and untested” bill. And while other elements are more settled, they don’t universally benefit those looking to burnish their online image. So while these five areas of the law may help your web reputation campaign, they may also work against it. In any event, this article will help you weigh the pros and cons, and consider the resources that might be involved.

What is branded content?

Branded content is usually clearly about a brand and appears to either represent the brand or portrays the brand as the subject of the content. It's content that has your brand "written all over it" even if you didn't create the content.  

Whereas Non-branded content, on the other hand, is not about the brand but still supports the industry or other areas of interest relative to the brand. The brand might be mentioned, but it is not the primary, or even secondary, focus of the content. 

Honest review sites are an important and valuable part of the information ecosystem. Yet often search engines amplify what should be a whisper to a scream. Who are the players in the bad news ecosystem? Reputation X studied 1000 people and companies with online reputation problems and here's what we learned.

You've written great content (or someone else has written it), now what do you do? Just post it and pray for traffic? That's not good enough. Instead, schedule multiple social postings and then syndicate your content. Here is how to do it in two 'sort of easy' steps. 

Summary

On May 30th, 2003 it was reported that Barbra Streisand sued a man claiming an invasion of her privacy because he shared aerial pictures of her Malibu home. Streisand inadvertently attracted more attention to her home by trying to suppress the images. The Streisand Effect is when the action of suppressing something to reduce or remove visibility it causes the opposite to happen. Similar terms include blowback and astroturfing.