Your Online Reputation

Protecting Your Online Reputation

Are people trash talking you, behind your virtual back? Sites like Facebook, GetSatisfaction, and myriads of online blogs and forums are hotbeds for haters, complainers, saboteurs, as well as those who feel they have legitimate gripes. It's a good idea to occasionally do a web search for your name, or the name of your business, and see what pops up. But you might want to go a step further, and do some pro-active monitoring of your online reputation. Here are some free tools you can use for that:

Google Alerts is one of the easiest ways to keep track of your online reputation (or anything else, for that matter). You can enter key search terms - such as your name or the name of your business - and Google will email you an alert every time a matching item crosses its mammoth radar screen. That may be a bit overwhelming if your search term is very broad, such as a common name like "Bill Smith". Fortunately, you can narrow the scope of your Google Alert in several ways.

First, you can limit the search to News, Videos, websites, blogs, or any combination of these categories. You can also specify that an alert should be sent on an item only if your search term occurs along with other specified keywords, i. e., "scam", "sucks" or "bad experience". Add negative keywords to your search, such as "-soccer" or "-australia" if there's a well-known person (or some guy in Australia) who shares your name. Finally, you can set the frequently at which you wish to receive alerts; maybe once a day is too often for you.

Technorati is a search engine specializing in blogs. When you search the Technorati site, the results page includes an "RSS" button that will activate an RSS feed of all future posts indexed by Technorati that match your search criteria. On the site, you can limit your results to Posts, Videos, or Photos pertaining to your search terms.

MonitorThis monitors the results of 26 different search engines for keyword phrases that you specify. Its results include the big search engines - Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. - and also many smaller "boutique" search engines that often index items within their areas of specialization before the big boys do.

Cyber-Slander: How to Fight Back

What can you do if someone is trashing your reputation online? You can ask them, nicely, to stop. If that doesn't work, you can sue if you have that kind of money. But actually, the cheapest and most effective way to counter bad words about you is to bury them under good words about you.

It doesn't matter what someone says about you if his/her words are on the 11th page of Google search results; very few people are going to find them. So your best bet is to get lots of positive items about you on the Web and get them ranked above the negative talk in search engine results. It sounds difficult and it is, so of course there are specialists who will do it for you - for a fee.

If you're concerned about privacy, a service like ReputationDefender.com will monitor the Web, finding and removing your personal information for $20 a month, or $99 for a full year. In addition to telephone directories, they also scan dozens of social networking sites for references to you.

If you need bigger guns, MyRepOnline offers to monitor and repair your online reputation, with plans ranging from $999 to $3999. Its consultants will write multiple, slightly different articles about you or your business; put them on websites, blogs, and consumer review sites; work some "SEO" or Search Engine Optimization magic, and get the positive words about you ranked way above the negative. The process takes about 3 to 5 weeks and isn't guaranteed to work forever; the trash-talker is not gagged, just outshouted. But a lawsuit costs more and takes much longer.

Do you have something to say about monitoring or defending your onlin reputation? Post a comment below...