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Yesterday I published a post on the Search Engine People site titled 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company!.

While the tactics mentioned may be enough to push some negative online mentions of you or your business to the second page of the search results or lower, in other cases they will not. The question then becomes; what else can you do when the initial tactics themselves aren’t enough, and you’ve got a negative piece about you ranking in the search results for an important phrase. Burying your head in the sand and hoping it goes away isn’t really a viable option. The answer … LOTS can be done!

Lets start with our goals … they’re progressive.

Progressive Goals:
Goal #1: First … bump the listing below the fold asap
then
Goal #2: Bump the listing off the first page of the search results for the given term(s)

With goals in hand, we can now consider tactics.

Tactics:
To Achieve Goal #1:

a. select the strongest 3-5 of those 50+ sites, where strong is a subjective assessment based on many factors. My personal assessment would be:

1. Digg
2. Twitter
3. Stumbleupon
4. MyBlogLog
5. Linkedin

b. establish a profile on each, where the profile name is the term/phrase the negative piece ranks for
c. get lots of friends on each of those sites … the more the better. It works best if you take an active role and participate. Each friend will result in an internal link back to your profile on that site, making it stronger.
d. within each site, you can see which profiles are the strongest in the offending engines’ eyes … the search engines themselves with rank them in order of importance given a simple search query (eg. site:twitter.com). Try to secure links from the strongest profiles first … they pass the most value.
e. join groups where possible too … often these will pass link power to your profile as well.
f. possibly create a social profiles menu on your site(s), and link to each of these profiles.

To Achieve Goal #2:

a. determine how far down you actually wish to push the piece. Beyond the first page will take a great deal of time and energy.
b. assuming you’ve already bumped the offending post below the fold, you need to select the number of sites you will need to use from the 50 + listed in the 50+ Sites to Help You Bury Negative Posts About You or Your Company! article.
c. follow the steps outlined above for each
d. within each (where possible) include links to all your other profiles on the other sites

Following these steps should be enough to push most negative mentions to the second page. If not, or if you don’t have the time and energy, do engage the services of a professional with experience in the space. Aside from the obvious value … its not a bad idea to take out profiles under your name anyway, just as a pre-emptive measure.

Please note … these tactics are by no means comprehensive or advanced. They’re just a relatively quick and efficient means for burying negative online mentions. Much more advanced tactics exist, which I will not delve into here.

Other great reference posts about reputation management include:
Glen Allsopp - What Is Online Reputation Management
Andy Beal - Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide
Todd Malicoat - Reputation Management Emancipation PRoclamation - 10 Ways to Own Yourself Online
Lee Odden - Basics of Online Reputation Management
Marty Weintraub - 9 Essential Tactics for Reputation Management in Social Media
Andy Beal - Buzz Monitoring: 26 Free Buzz Tracking Tools
David Wallace - Using Social Media to Help Manage Online Reputation

Google has just made SEO-PR (that’s Public Relations, not PageRank) harder and easier at the same time! Two updates have been made to the Comments feature in Google News. Comments allows people in the news to, well, comment on stories about them or their company.

Comments have to be verified by Google, which is good since we can only imagine how this service could be abused. To make that process easier, there is now a contact form in case you find yourself in the midst of your 15 minutes of fame.

Also, there is now a link to all Google Comments in the main Google News page. Once on the page featuring all of the comments, you can search the comments as long as you put your keyword with “source:google_news.” You can subscribe to an RSS feed of those specific results or create a Google Alert for them.

An SEO’s job is never done, and these updates to Google News Comments has made sure of it! Universal search made online reputation management an ever more important task. At least with these updates, Google News offers users an outlet for telling the flip side of the story.

LinkedIn has announced the creation of 160,000 company profiles as part of their career social networking site. But as recent Google rater guidelines show, LinkedIn profiles are considered relevant in search results, at least for individuals.

If this translates now to company profiles, will the select 160,000 businesses get a free boost in the SERP’s by LinkedIn? Will companies with keywords in the name of their business be able to get their LinkedIn profile to rank in the top 10 results in Google? It’s too soon to tell, and LinkedIn Company profiles are only visible to registered users.

According to IRS data, there were 5.7 million firms with employees in 2002. The implications for a LinkedIn company profile being favored in the SERPs has definite implications for millions of excluded businesses.

The advantage of a potential boost lies in online reputation management. Google tends to give preference to the official site of a company. But many executives are concerned about negative reviews and bad press. The prevalence of a LinkedIn profile could bump at least one of those results to the second page.

Updates to the Google Quality Rater guidelines have popped up, and Brian Ussery has written up a nice summary of the revised standards.

There’s good news for those who have embraced social media. It seems Google feels that the elements on blogs and social network sites like MySpace should be ranked as relevant. The language of this particular guideline is geared more towards individuals, though companies can encourage their employees to utilize sites like LinkedIn to gain further visibility in search results. This may also help with online reputation management if it pushes third party sites and reviews down further in the results.

E-tailers will also want to take note of guidelines for how raters consider commerce sites. Shopping carts, return policies, shipping calculators, and gift registries are among the features raters should look for when rating a site as relevant. This is to distinguish e-commerce from “thin affiliates.”

Thin affiliates are considered to be sites that offer no value to visitors. They simply contain links to merchants where they can then purchase a product advertised by the thin affiliate. This is deemed spam in the rater’s guidelines. However, affiliate sites that offer reviews, price comparisons or some other value-add to featured products or services are ok.

Though, Philipp Lenssen points out parked domains are met with a bit of “do as I say and not as I do” philosophy. While the guidelines mark parked domains as spam, Google maintains its DomainPark program, which allows domain owners to slap a page full of Adsense on their sites.

The updated version of the standards was released in April 2007, which preceded a heightened effort by Google to crack down on paid links.

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• “Googlewash” Is Googlewashed by Online Reputation Defenders
  Googlewashing now appears to be the domain of online reputation management companies.
• Google News UK Sorting News Without Bias?
  Can the flap of a butterfly’s wings in the Googleplex set off a tornado in the top UK news and media sites?
• SEW Experts: The TV Writers — And the Buzz — Are Back
  The end of the TV writers’ strike holds some meaningful lessons for search marketers.
• Spamalot? Yahoo! Buzz Is Not Your Holy Grail
  Yahoo! Buzz promises to squash spammers with a team of spam cops: the Yahoo! Buzz Editors.

Click to read the rest of this post…

Googlewashing is now the domain of live nude girls.

SEO PR and online reputation management companies officially co-opted the word “Googlewashing” today with the help of KUSA, a Denver NBC TV station. Yesterday the local news affiliate broadcast a story about “cleaning up negative information on the Internet.”

The story on embarassing photos and digital dirt resurrected the googlewash meme. Googlewashing now appears to be the domain of online reputation management companies like ReputationHawk.com, DefendMyName.com and ReputationDefender.com that charge to clean up your digital dirt.

Why else did googlewashing become such a hot topic on the day William F. Buckley Jr. died?

KUSA’s report and Web site video features nude and topless young women (covered by black bars for TV and Web audiences). No doubt that sent viewers racing to the search engines - and spawned follow-up stories at other local TV Web sites and blogs.

Googlewashing started as a threat to free speech and not a solution to personal indiscretions.

Andrew Orlovski of The Register UK coined “googlewash” from the word “greenwash” - a spot of paint that “transforms” something rotten into something new. The reality? Nothing’s changed.

The phrase that spurred Orlovski’s imagination originated almost five years ago to the day (Feb 17, 2003). Patrick Tyler in a front page story in the New York Times wrote that global anti-war protests had become “the second superpower.” Yet within 42 days, a small group of A-List tech bloggers had co-opted the phrase to mean something much more benign, pushing the anti-war slogan in the Times story further down in Google rankings.

That led Orlovski to realize Google had been “gamed” - and, he noted, the English language perverted - by the power of inbound links. The “meaning” of the phrase “second superpowers” had changed almost instantly.

Googlewashing soon morphed into googlebombing. The famous “miserable failure” ranking for President Bush (since eliminated by Google). Marissa Mayer responded to the controversy on the Official Google Blog in September of 2005 in her post “Googlebombing failure.”

Only months later Brian Livingston blogged Googlewashing’ Makes Your Site Invisible.

Livingston changed googlewash to mean the practice of scraping and stealing Web content on another blog. The result? Duplicate content appearing above your own.

He called it an example of “Googlewashing” — a term that combines Google and brainwashing.

In the ultimate irony, former war correspondent Kevin Sites, recently did a report on googlewashing: not for its Orwellian role in the anti-war movement but in a multimedia profile for Yahoo News of paid search advertiser ReputationDefender.com.