I have been toying with creating a new service for reputation remediation but have decided not to pursue this as a service for my firm mainly because the vetting process would be so difficult. How do you really know who has been a victim and who really warrants the bad PR about themselves online? Typically I feel like I am a pretty good judge of character, but I have been fooled. I simply do not want to use my expertise to remediate someone’s online identity so they can hurt people again.
As I will not be rolling out the service, I have done enough research to know that for people who really need help and who may have been targeted without justification that this may be a very workable approach for them to take themselves.
1. Social Media Account Set Up
In an effort to push down bad search results we recommend that you set up accounts on these selected social networking and social media sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FriendFeed, Plaxo, Naymz, Tagged, and Xing. The more information you enter the more complete your online presence and more legitimate it will be .
Additionally if you have pictures of your family, pets, and a recent vacation we recommend you load them. Make yourself a real person one who is approachable.
2. Do 10 Days of Status Updates on Your Social Media Accounts
Update the status on each of the accounts you set up twice a day for 10 business days. You want the search engines to believe that these are new active social networking accounts to allow them to be included in their search indexes.
3. BlogSpot Blog Set Up
In an effort to additionally remediate your reputation online we recommend that you blog set up a Blogspot. Make sure to register your blog with Google and the other search engines.
4. Create and Publish 12 Blog Posts
In an effort to provide additional positive content about you, we recommend that you write twelve blog posts over a four week period posting on a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule. Each blog post should speak positively about you and your services. Highlight different positive things about yourself such as non-profit participation, church activities, family events, things you are working on that will benefit your community or business environment. Link to your website and your social networking profiles.
At the end of four to six weeks take a look on the various search engines to see what has happened. I would love to hear feedback from you if you try this program to tell me if our recommendations worked to help drop down the bad search results on your name or business name. Typically Google will update their index the fastest. You may see an improvement in search results under your name in as little as 7 days. Yahoo and Bing update their index on about a three to six week cycle so results will appear on those two engines much more slowly.