Building Trust Online - Reputation Management

Online, you have access to a truly enourmous amount of information. Thanks to search engines like Google, you can find out literally anything about any topic in seconds. And while this is really nice - and it has certainly revolutionized the way we get information - it also has introduced new problems. If anything bad about you or your company gets out on the internet, then search engines are going to pick it up, and people are going to see it when they search. Unfortunately, it is ridiculously simple and easy for anyone (competitors, customers, ex-employers etc) to seriously damage a companies online reputation that they may have built up. So something had to be done about it.

In response to these problems, many companies and SEO firms came out offering reputation management services. You must realize though that it is very, very difficult to entirely get rid of results from search engines - and Google isn’t going to care if they are indexing pages that damage your business. Many sites that people use to post slanderous material (like ripoffreport and complaintsboard) explicitly state that they do not remove content, ever, under any circumstances. Many people feel that this is ridiculous that they don’t care if users are blatantly making things up and hiding behind a computer screen. So bearing in mind the fact that it’s often near impossible to entirely eliminate negative results, then what can actually be done? The way these reputation management companies help you out is by knocking down any pages you don’t want out of the first page of results. That way, the first page of results will only have websites that you want to be there. Now of course, users will still find the negative pages if they keep searching long enough. But studies show the the majority of web users do not look past the first page of results. When you have a lot of nice results that give positive references, or in general mention your company in a positive light, then I guarantee your potential customers will be more eager to buy from you.

So you probably want to know what companies are worth dealing with. Apparently RepSpinner is pretty good, from what I have heard. Without doubt RepSpinner is far cheaper than the majority of other reputation management companies, and they are able to get things done quickly according to most of the reports I have seen. Simply, easy projects (where there is little competition) can be completed for under a thousand dollars total. If you give them something really tough, though, it can take them months of work. My best advice is to get a quote from as many different companies as you can and make your decision from there. If possible, have an agreement where you only pay when you see results. A lot of companies will never, ever agree to get paid only when they get the results they promise you, because they are (to but it bluntly) just scamming you and not planning to ever deliver on their promises. The firms that get back to you and agree for you not to pay until they get the results you want are the ones that deserve your business.

By the way, if you are going with RepSpinner, it is worth noting that they have a number of other services related to reputation management. They are very good at doing brand building for new online businesses (this is where a reputation and new pages are built to appear in google).