Ways Your Online Reputation May Be Sabotaged

In 2006, while I was working in a lobbying and political management firm in Pasig City, I was assigned to work on a client. The client sought help because typing his name in Google generated negative results from an investigative journalism site and other news sites. This client's case got me acquianted with online reputation management.

Negative online reputation not only come through a negative comment from forums, blogs or tweets. There are other ways your competition or a previously terminated employee can attack you and your company. I'm writing this post not to promote the negative side of Search Engine Optimization but to educate others as to how else your name, company or brand can be smeared online so that you know what to look for when monitoring your online reputation.

In 2007, Forbes.com interviewed a seasoned SEO and discussed about the saboteurs of search. Among the ways you can be attacked and sabotaged are as follows:

• GOOGLE BOWLING is done by creating spam sites and linking it back to your site. In 2003, then US Pres. George W. Bush has been Google bombed. Web users using the search query "Miserable Failure" are sent to his profile on the White House website.


• GOOGLE TATTLING. When a site violates some of the rules Google has set in their webmaster guidelines, the site is penalized. This would lead to a drop in rankings, or getting banned in the search engines. Some people report sites as violating these rules. So it is important to read Google's Webmaster Guidlines lest your competitors may see that as an opprtunity to put your site down.


• CONTENT DUPLICATION Google is very particular with duplicate content. Sites with duplicate content is either penalized or banned. This is one reason why any website should monitor and make sure that the copies they up online are not duplicated.

• GOOGLE INSULATION Not all negative seo tactics are done directly. One way to drop other site's rank is by setting-up many websites and optimizing all of them so that they will go up the SERP and outrank your site. This may also be done to hide some nasty search engine results down the 6th or 7th page of the search engines.

• CLICK FRAUD Aside from the organic search, another way to generate traffic is through paid ads, also known as PPC or Pay-Per-Click ads. Click Fraud involves sending fraudulent clicks to a PPC listing. The clicks can be artificially generated via automated technology methods (bots) or via manual clicking. The intent of the fruad may be to raise money for the site hosting, ad space, or to financially hurt the advertiser.

• DENIAL OF SERVICE ATTACK is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely (wikipedia).

I hope that these information has been helpful. If you have comments, topic suggestions, or some general query on online reputation management, please feel free to contact me or leave a message in this post.

Own Your Name Online

Imagine you are " Company ABC". A user typed "Company ABC" into the Google search box and gets search results from sites with a negative comment about your company.  Or a potential employer or investor doing a background check on you and sees a Rip-Off Report post about you. These scenarios are potential headache to any business or individual.

As of March 31, 2009, there are around 1,596,270,108 internet users all over the world according to internetworldstats.com. 50-70% of the 1,596,270,108 use internet to search information. This means more and more people are going online to look up a product, a service, a company or an individual.

There people online looking for what is being said about you or your company. Some may base their judgment and decision on these online feedbacks. If you are a company or an individual, it is important that you own your name online because every negative comment said about you or your company may mean missed-out revenue or job opportunity. 

For these reasons, you might want to considering looking up your online reputation. You want your official website or your professional profile to be on top of the Search Engine Result Page when searched.

In my future posts, I'll be featuring some of the tools you can use to monitor and manage your online reputation. Meanwhile, here are two things you can do to start claiming your name online:

1. LinkdIn is a business-oriented social networking site founded by Reid Hoffman in December 2002. It was launched in May 2003 and is mainly used for professional networking. For companies and indivisuals, this is a good site to establish your reputation. 
2. Facebook - with the large population of Facebook users, this is a good site to build your reputation. For businesses, you can create a Facebook page and send updates about your company or brand. This is also a good way to connect to your target audience or target market. Big brands like Coca-Cola is already connected to their consumers through Facebook. In the local political arena, Cong. Roilo Golez of Paranaque and Sen. Chiz Escudero already started ahead of their political rivals by connecting to as many constituents.

There are other sites such as MySpace and Multiply that you can use for your online branding. But the key here is to know the demographics of the users to have the maximum benefit for your business.