No matter how good and honest you or your company is; accusations of misconduct can quickly damage your online digital reputation. You may not be able to erase what has been said, but there are steps you can take to minimize the damage. The goal should be to push the damaging statements down in the organic search results and replace these with positive information.

1. Research: Look at the root cause of the online discussions and what can be done to bring the conversations to an end. The repair process can only start once the controversy ends.
2. Keywords: Settle on the targeted phrases. Keep the focus to one phrase or two at the most. This could be your name, company, brand or an event.
3. Identify: List out articles, websites and blogs that already exist that should be moved to displace the damaging stories.
4. Your Website: Add new material and fully optimize the primary website for the company, brand or celebrity. This is the one website that you completely control.
5. Link Popularity: Launch linking campaigns for the identified articles, blogs, etc that you want to be found. Use the keyword phrases in the link text for the best results.
6. Blogging and Press Releases: Launch one or more blogs where you can control the content. Use independent blog networks and have blogs written based on press release. Release traditional press releases through normal media channels.
7. Wikipedia: For people or companies with prominent reputations, this is a key resource. If an article exists add content and make changes. If none exists, consider starting a new topic.
8. YouTube and Flickr: Promote and publish videos and photos. Title them and tag them with your targeted keyword phrase.
9. Monitor and do damage control: Monitor the blogosphere for negative or disparaging remarks. Address these quickly and appropriately.
10. Measure results: Monitor the first 3 pages of the search results for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Record the positions of the articles you want to purge. You are successful when they no longer appear in the first 3 pages of results.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 5:08 am and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.