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Reputation Armor…What To Do With Negative Google Results?

Reputation Armor recommends that you take a second and Google your company name, your domain name, and your personal name. What do those results on the first page or two in Google look like? Optimistically everything on the first few pages of search results is positive. However, Reputation Armor has seen a rise in negative results for companies that have had a good reputation for years previous.

These are examples of negative Google results that Reputation Armor finds:

  • Blog or forum posts from disgruntled customers or previous employees.
  • Negative reviews of your business, possibly planted there by your competition.
  • Embarrassing and possibly false, personal details about top executives in your company.

Reputation Armor even finds entire sites devoted to the countless ways in which a  specific company “sucks“.

If there are negative listings on the first few pages of Google, you can bet that many of your customers are seeing them. And that’s going to have a big effect on whether or not they decide to do business with you. Reputation Armor will provide “Google insulation” to push down the negative while shining a light on the positive.

For more information contact Reputation Armor @ http://www.reputationarmor.com

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Reputation Armor Statistics for Reputation Management

Reputation Armor has found 79% of managers reviewed online information about job applicants. 70% rejected candidates based on what they found.

18%, Reputation Armor also notes, of companies found social networking profiles as constructive because they presented an excellent feel for culture fit and added trustworthiness to the candidates’ resumes. Reputation Armor believes this number is only going to continue to grow.

76% of executives anticipate being Googled however 22% have never Googled their own name to see what companies and recruiters will hit upon.

According to a study last year, Reputation Armor observes, the top industries most likely to screen job candidates using social networking sites and search engines include those who handle sensitive information.

Contact Reputation Armor @ http://www.reputationarmor.com

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What Reputation Armor Thinks about Google PageRank

There is always a lot of Hoopla and Hype about Google Pagerank (PR). Is Google PageRank worth all the web chatter? Reputation Armor sees everyone talking about how important PageRank is, even we are caught up in the PageRank addiction.

Reputation Armor notes a comment the other day on a forum and someone posted this comment about PageRank:

“The PageRank you see in the toolbar is a sketchy and stale metric of what a pages PageRank used to be. A simple analogy is getting into your car to go for a drive, knowing that the fuel gauge only shows the amount of fuel that was in your tank 3 months ago. But would you really trust that there is gas in it today?”

In the opinion of Reputation Armor the green PageRank bar is like your website’s report card. It won’t help much on its own, but it represents other things about your site. If a site has a PR7 and is ranking well, it’s not ranking there because of the PageRank itself, but because of what that PageRank represents - Dedicated SEO Work, lots of inbound links, several coming from other quality sites.

Reputation Armor knows it is not the PageRank that is important, it is what you did to get the PageRank that hold the true value.

At ReputationArmor.com we  certainly admit that PageRank isn’t as valuable as it once was. However, it is still reputed to be a small portion of the Google algorithm (along with 100+ other factors), making it not entirely insignificant. It might not help much, but if it helps at all then it can’t be considered “insignificant”.

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Reputation Armor Answers…What To Do With Negative Results

ReputationArmor.com observes it all the time…you do a search (searching for your own name in Google or Yahoo), or maybe you were just doing some SEO homework to see how your website was ranking. Either way, you stumbled upon some negative information on a forum or service review website.

One that made you steaming mad…

Negative an false information about our clients infuriates us at Reputation Armor.

It happens, and when it does you have a right to be angry. You also have the right to defend your good name, jump into the ring swinging to defend your company reputation.

But don’t do it.

Reputation Armor advises not to react to those reviews like this because it’s going to harm you more than it’s going to help you. Let reputation armor explain to you how most of the search engine algorithms work. You see, they like to see action on a website. So when you attach new content to a forum, blog or review site, you are actually adding fuel to the fire. Google and the rest see the site as a hot news item, being updated frequently, so they rank it better in the search results.

That’s right, your retort makes their complaint rank higher in the search results. Reputation Armor has also found that it makes it harder for us to move when we get hired to clean up the mess. If you’ll consider action rather than reaction, you’ll make our job easier and the overall cleanup less expensive and faster overall.

I know it’s tempting to defend your good name. But reputationarmor.com asks that you to leave this to us.  We’re WILL fix the problem and we’re going to defend your name for you with positive content creation. But you have to let Reputation Armor do its job

Not that we can’t clean things up if you’ve already responded out of passion. It’s just easier to do if you haven’t added content to the offending site or sites.

An irate review can hurt you. A hurried response to an angry review can wound you even more. Instead of reacting, please contact Reputation Armor @ reputationarmor.com and let us launch a plan of action to remedy the problem.

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ReputationArmor Tip of the Day for Reputation Management #1

Reputation Armor Tip

Google yourself. The most effortless method to uncover where you or your company’s online reputation stands is to Google (search) yourself. See what sort of results are generated first. If they aren’t what you would like them to be, you’ve got some work to do.

Tip of the day brought to you by reputationarmor.com

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ReputationArmor.com SEO Quote of the Day #1

Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.

SEO quote of the day brought to you by,  Reputation Armor

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Reputation Armor Answers: Budgeting for SEO, The Question…How Much Should I Spend?

SEO comes at a cost. Whether that is purely your investment in time or having to pay for a specialist SEO consultant or agency, it is far from being free. One thing it is though, is critical. You simply can’t have a thriving website without adhering to some SEO principles. Reputationarmour.com is here to help

Search engines don’t just bestow sites rankings. A website has to earn it. They have to show the search engine exactly what they do and persuade them that they deserve a position in the upper echelons of their listings. Without a decent presence within the search engines, you will struggle to find any meaningful traffic. While there are alternative marketing avenues open, SEO remains the paramount technique purely because of the power of search engines.

So when you come to budget for SEO you have to first make a decision on how you are going to implement it. If you are planning to do all the work yourself, then you’ll need to put aside a reasonable amount of time to do so properly. If you are looking to outsource it to an agency or expert , then you need to establish how much you are prepared to invest. Representatives at Reputation Armor can asses your issues, and find a plan of attack that works for your budget.

None of these is going to be inexpensive per se. Obviously some will be more cost (and time) efficient than others, but to do SEO right you need to invest. For example, every page of your website needs content. This isn’t a quick process, particularly if you have a large site. When you are starting from scratch, the amount of work required increases manifold, but don’t worry, reputation armor is fully staffed and ready to work around the clock so you don’t have to.

Learning SEO isn’t difficult, but perfecting it is not only a full time job but also an art. There are tutorials everywhere (you can find tips on reputationarmor.com) that can help you to hone your skills and at least gain an understanding of the fundamentals. Websites, blogs (like this one) and books are all available with useful, useable ideas to help get you up and running. But again, this takes time. While this may not involve any actual expenditure (unless you include buying books), it will take a number of days or even weeks to gain a basic understanding.

Search engine optimization is something that is perfected through practice. This is why the leading industry lights have all been active for years. In this time you come to understand the nuances of each technique and work out the best practices for achieving the best results. This is why employing a qualified company or individual can really benefit you.

Obviously, reputation armor already has the knowledge and experience to get started immediately. We can also present useful information that will help with the future development of the site. All of this information should be taken on board; but by employing an SEO, the main advantage is that you don’t have to waste time creating, implementing and adjusting the content yourself. reputationarmor.com will do this on your behalf, and  with greater effectiveness than a DIY effort.

If cost is no object, get a leading SEO agency. They will be able to implement changes on your behalf that will make a real change and leave you free to run your business. If you are on a tight budget but have plenty of time on your hands, you might want to consider learning SEO and beginning the process of implementing the copy, Meta and building your linking structure. For those with a relatively small budget and a little time available to optimize the website, try collaborating with a consultant.

Budgeting isn’t effortless, but don’t try to get away with spending too little. We here at reputation armor know that you get out of SEO what you are prepared to put in. So if you decide to cut corners, it may well show in your results. That isn’t to say that you have to go for the most expensive option, but you do have to be prepared to invest in your site.

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Google Search Suggestions Are Damaging Online Reputations

 

Google has always maintained that the search suggestions that appear when you type in a company name or keyword are set algorithmically and they shouldn’t be required to make changes to these suggestions or remove words like Scam, Lawsuits, Fraud and Reviews from the suggestions.

 

 

It is common for people to make searches that include words like “scam”, and “lawsuit” in order to perform due diligence and check out a company. The Google suggestions algorithm just seems to pick up the search activity and, voila, you’ve got a nasty bit of potential defamation included in the suggestions box — even if there is little or nothing online about the topic.

 

I’ve seen this happen with “searches related to” suggestions as well, when clicking on the link sometimes provides only one or even no results! I’d say this is an algorithm in dire need of attention. Google should not be so academic as to ignore the effect that their Suggestion can have on a company’s reputation.

 

Even if it is automated, Google is still publishing the suggestion. That means they should be subject to all laws related to defamation, slander and libel. Google is working very hard and very cleverly to amass great amounts of power. They need to match that power with even greater amounts of responsibility.

 

When you type in your company name in Google search, do they suggest you also search YOUR COMPANY + SCAM or anything negatively similar?

 

You can possibly take control of this and trick Google in to suggesting other words like News, Jobs or Pictures. The process can take months to accomplish but is possible. For more information on Google Search Suggestion manipulation contact Reputation Armor at 888-358-2766.

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Use A No-Index Tag To Keep Pages Off Google

To prevent all robots (search engines) from indexing a page on your site, place the following meta tag into the <head> section of your page:

 
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

 
To allow other robots to index the page on your site, preventing only Google’s robots from indexing the page use:

 
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex”>

 
When Google sees the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from their search results, even if other pages link to it. Other search engines, however, may interpret this directive differently. As a result, a link to the page can still appear in their search results.

 
In closing: If you do not want people to find a certain page online through the search engines then use this noindex tag. Wish we could all add noindex to any page we wanted! This would make search engine reputation management easy (but a dead industry).

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