The Reputation Management Blog

It happens. Someone published negative content about yourself or your brand. Believe it or not, there are ways to get this content removed. Many tactics involve negotiation to get web content taken down.

Are you the only person in the world with your name? Probably not. We work too hard maintaining our reputations to fall victim to someone else’s mistakes. This can happen if someone with the same name as you or your company is involved in a scandal or some type of negative publicity. The reputational downfall associated with their name can affect you since you share the same name and, as a result, the same search results.

Sometimes the actions that other people take can affect your own reputation in a very serious way.

• What do you do when someone with the same name as you is involved in a scandal?
• How do you distinguish yourself if you have a very common name?
• What tools can you use to monitor what is being said about your name online?

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.

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.

While reading the new book by Cyrus Farivar entitled Habeas Data we began to think about what an honest privacy policy might look like. Then things quickly got out of hand. Enjoy.

The genie is out of the bottle. In this day and age, everything is public and visible. A plethora of information floats around the internet and trying to control who posts what feels like boiling the ocean. To make it worse, it takes so much time to build a reputation and only one bad moment to tarnish it.

Many businesses focus on SEO, social media and content to build their online presence. One way to accelerate your online growth is to focus on growing your brand through citations and mentions. Both Google and Bing have indicated that they can track brand mentions and that they matter for search engine rankings. Duane Forrester, a former senior product manager at Bing, stated that unlinked mentions can be just as strong a signal as links for measuring a site’s authority.

Remember when Donald Trump said "America should never have given Canada its independence"? Well, that was fake. Fake news has a long and storied history. Ben Franklin spread propaganda stories by creating a fake issue of the Boston Independent Chronicle. Today celebrities, politicians and everyday people are affected by it. Tomi Lahren of Fox News was recently quoted as saying "If you die in a mass shooting, it's not the fun's fault, or even the gunman's fault. It's your fault for not believing in God enough". She didn't say that either.

There are five ways to remove content or to effectively remove it.

Bad search results can kill a brand. When your brand is generating negative search results, you'll of course quickly attempt to remove the posts to save your reputation. Unfortunately, it can't all be removed, but some of it can. For content in search results that can be removed, this guide will let you know every possible way there is to make it go away. 

Here are a few of the ways online content can be removed - either from the site itself, or from search results (both are avenues to the same outcome) to provide lower, or no visibility of the negative content online. Read on to find out how to regain control over your search results. 

Brand touch points are like digital fingerprints; they tell a story. What are brand touch points and how do they affect business? Whether you realize it or not, your brand's customer touch points are working to help, or hurt, your organization's reputation with consumers. If a potential customer sees brand-related content and it piques their interest, what will they do next? They may perform a branded search (using your company name), in which case it's up to Google what your customer sees. How dost Google love thee?