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Honestly I never previously considered or thought about reputation management services which are companies that exist to help improve or manage an online presence or how your reputation is perceived when someone searches for your name or business in various search engines.
Now I haven’t had to worry about negative PR or anything because generally I run a fairly straight and transparent online presence. I know all things are public, I approach everything with professionalism and I don’t sell a product that I make and market.
However, I have seen some company owners, entrepreneurs and companies get some bad flak online and wonder what they do when negative comments and sentiments tend to go viral.
This is where a reputation management organization comes into play, where they do a kind of “reverse SEO” burying the negative stuff online so that when searches for your name or company are done the positive/neutral information is in the front of the SERP pages, with the negative publicity pushed further back in the SERP to where it is unlikely to be found without doing additional digging.
Now, there could be good reasons to suppress negative feedback and other reasons why it could be considered shady tactics. So I am going to share with you a personal story, I know someone that if you do a search for their name online it will reveal an old news article which is kind of shady. This news article is about a totally bogus claim against this person, but because this newspaper decided to print the claim it can paint the person in a bad light if it wasn’t for the fact that nothing else EVER in life would indicate this person is capable of the things claimed.
Ironically, 10 years later a search for this persons name and this article from this old news story still shows very prevalent on the first page of Google SERP results, seriously 10 years later! This is because the person in question isn’t a company, isn’t a corporation and is simply a person with a very small online presence (barely any but a Facebook page and maybe a LinkedIn profile). So the person has no new content being created online with their name in it which leaves this old news story lingering out there a potential thorn in one’s side.
This would be a case where I would use a service to bury the article from showing up in the SERP at all. Clearly blatant and false claims or hate speech that shows or ranks too high where you put your reputation at risk is worth dealing with. I would always address such things head on, but in case you have trouble you may need a reputation management company to assist you.
-Justin Germino
WPX Support
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