BrandTitan

How classic, the irony is priceless. Here you have a site that just rips on so many businesses for not being ethical, and the site largely subsists off its search engine rankings… meanwhile it, itself is being totally unethical from a search engine guidelines perspective. Funny considering I recently heard “RipOff Report’s technical people indicate that they site is NOT violating Google’s Guidelines” (apparently quoted from one of their attorneys).

Out of all the types of businesses that Rip Off Report could sell text link …

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Alerts - as in Google Alerts is a free service which can better one’s awareness of new content containing specific keywords. Examples of terms which can be tracked are names, company names, and product names. Data is monitored from Google web search, blog search, video, groups, and news search.

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Blog - Also known as weblogs or web journals; often used by people to publish their personal writings. Blogs are now commonly used by corporations as well to communicate with consumers, fans, and critics alike. Because of today’s technology blogs have become fairly simple to setup and thus millions of people …

For our purposes we generally classify negative publicity into two categories:

1. Online negative publicity - Any negative publicity that appears on the internet
2. Offline negative publicity - Any negative publicity that happens outside of the internet. Examples include: within media such as newspapers, TV Ads, magazines etc. Often times this negative press is duplicated on the online version of the particular media (e.g. the newspaper’s website).

Resistance to New Ideas, Products or Services

Innovative people and companies often face harsh criticism when they release new ideas or products. The negative press and discussions that occur at this time can often linger on even after …

Online reputation management should be done with professional help and a well thought out plan of action. Reputation management gone wrong has the potential to create a worse scenario than the original reason the campaign was initiated.

Let’s take an example of a company which offers to “DESTROY” negative content for less than $30.00 per month. Even by off-shore pricing standards, at best that would buy 3 hours of time by an educated and technically savvy employee. Doesn’t leave much room for supervision or a personalized approach that won’t offend those who published this critical information does it?

Here’s the fine print:
You …

Forums can serve a great purpose online: communities of link minded or even opposing persons can congregate and exchange ideas and share information. In reality however, this idealic scenario is not the way it goes down. Often times forum users rely on the general anonymity involved to put forth overly excessive venting and ranting against everything from coworkers to neighbors to businesses they’ve had experiences with.

It’s important for companies and individuals who have faced damaging press and incidents in the past, present, or those which have a high likelihood of being “slammed” in the future (e.g. politicians running for office, …

“Woah, what is this person talking about?!? Is this me they are referring to or someone with my same name? Uh-oh, they referred to my professional career – they must be talking about me but that’s not true!”

Sound familiar? While there are plenty of cases where the complaint or criticism is legitimate there are thousands of instances where the information given is completely erroneous.

Unscrupulous competitors or others with a personal vendetta are largely the source of these types of reputation attacks. Unfortunately for the victim, people who read these tirades are unlikely to make that connection and instead are …

A basic truism – “Perfection is the lowest standard” – applies to just about every business situation. While you want your company, service, or product to be outstanding and offer lots of value to clients and customers, pursuing perfection will not get you very far. In fact, pursuing perfection would guarantee that your company doors would never even open.

Of course, if your company is not perfect, negative results will sometimes occur. The delivery will be delayed, a customer will be billed incorrectly, or an employee will be less than pleasant with an important client. No matter how carefully you structure …

Many businesses spend considerable time and money optimizing their sites for search engine rankings and designing websites that will draw in visitors. Unfortunately, as a company, you do not have control over all search engine ranking pages (SERPs). Even if you spend considerable effort on your SEO strategy, the first page of search results for your company name can include detractor’s web sites as well as your own. In fact, if you Google any top company – from McDonald’s to Starbucks – you find not only the official website on the first page of results, but also a flame site …

When you Google your company name, what do you see? You may be spending a lot of money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your site and you may be offering a great product, but if your detractors are also using SEO, you may find that criticisms of your business rank just below or even above your own site. What can you do when Google results start ruining your reputation? You have several options:

Use your own SEO strategy to keep your site and your feeder sites high on the search engine rankings. Your web design firm can help you get …

Social networking sites such as MySpace and YouTube are virtually unavoidable today, when it sometimes seems that everyone you know is on some networking site. Already there are many news stories out about companies running Google searches on potential applicants – and not hiring those applicants with unsavory MySpace pages.

Even if your company’s official Web 2.0 presence is perfectly respectable, though, there are many ways that social networking sites could be damaging your business reputation:

Employees and team members may have unsavory pages on social networking sites – and may be identifying themselves with your company.
Customers and even competitors may be …