9 Key Points for Cleaning Up Your Online Reputation Nightmare Via SEO

Columnist Chris Silver Smith discusses how to highlight the positive and better hide the negative to improve how you look online -- without breaking the bank. 

The Online Reputation Management (“ORM”) sector has been estimated to be a $5 billion industry, handling the development, monitoring and repair of the online identities of individuals and brands. While this is a robust industry, you don’t have to break the bank to correct a reputation situation for yourself or a business. It can even be a DIY project — it isn’t rocket science!
A straightforward defamation case can cost $10,000 in legal fees, just as a starting point — and, those cases can still require some amount of SEO work in combination with the legal efforts to get things cleaned up (publishers in the U.S. are not considered legally responsible for what others may post on their sites, so social media sites or search engines may choose not to remove damaging materials in some cases).
Also, some of the larger reputation repair firms can charge premium fees over the course of many months to get nasty stuff fixed. (In some cases, the shadier reputation firms can actually be the very same sites that are damaging your reputation, such as this revenge porn site operator!)
These tips are primarily for those taking a DIY approach to cleaning up their search results, but this information can also be of use to internet marketing agencies that are looking to mitigate a client’s reputation issue. When agencies ask me to look at the repair work they’re doing for a client, I usually find that they’re doing a number of very beneficial and capable things, but they may have missed a few of the basics (or just not gone quite far enough to push the negatives further down).

The SEO And ORM Relationship

As you may know, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a set of practices geared towards improving a site’s or page’s rankings in search engine results. Many e-commerce companies use SEO, for instance, in getting their pages about products and services to rank advantageously in search results. In online reputation repair cases, we’re doing a similar thing, although the focus is placed on a name or identity that is represented upon multiple pages instead of a primary one.
If you have one or two negative things that appear in search results when your name is searched upon — whether they are RipOff Reports, an arrest record, a defamatory statement or a negative review page — there will typically be a combination of other pages within the results that are either positive or neutral.
For an online reputation repair project, we’re looking to enhance the ranking capability of the positive and negative items appearing in search results so that they may improve and ascend, displacing the negative content. We may also create additional new, positive content to either help the other good stuff or to introduce strategically advantageous new stuff that might rank higher than the bad stuff.
Here are some basic SEO points to keep in mind:

1. Include Your Name Within Positive Content

There may be good content about you already, but if your name isn’t closely associated with that content, it’ll be less powerful than any negative content specifically targeting your name.
For the sake of search engine algorithms, you’ll want your name in the text on the pages of good content, and you’ll want it to appear in a number of advantageous places in the page code. Of course, this is assuming you’re able to influence or edit the page(s) in question.

2. Ensure Positive Pages Contain Your Name In The Title Tag

The page’s HTML title element is perhaps the most important item for zeroing in on your name and making the page rank well when that name is searched. The page’s title should contain your name — spelled exactly like you spell it, leaving out initials or additional titles (Jr, Dr., Mr/Mrs, etc.) if you don’t commonly use that when listing your name. (Conversely, it should be included if the people who search for your name online are likely to use it when conducting searches.)
For things like your social media profile pages, the user name or field where you specify how your name appears will automatically handle publishing this in the title – so you don’t necessarily have to have direct access to the page’s HTML code (or web development knowledge) to edit the title tag.

3. Ensure Positive Pages Contain Your Name In The URL

Ideally, the page’s URL should contain your name, just as the title should. Example: www.awebsite.com/Your-Name.html
As with page title elements, many social media services and online directories may automatically parse your proper name into the URL. In other cases (such as websites you control or have access to), dashboards or settings pages may require you to manually specify the page URL.
When including your name in a page URL, it does not matter if the name is in uppercase, lowercase or a mixture — search engines are primarily case-insensitive. Note that most websites will not allow one to have spaces in URLs, which makes a real difference in multiple-word names (ex: “John Smith”). Instead, they may allow dashes, periods, underscores or even parenthesis.
Google and other search engines treat some of these types of other characters as “white space” characters, essentially using them just like spaces and enabling them to influence rankings for multi-word searches. While visually appealing, underscores are not treated as white space characters, so one should avoid them. It’s best to use a dash or a period, which are considered white space characters (ex: “john.smith” or “john-smith”). Your second best choice is probably a URL term that leaves out spaces (ex: “johnsmith”).
If those options are unavailable, you still might opt for using the underscore (ex: “john_smith”) as your third choice, as it may still enhance your search rankings some, albeit at a weaker level as a “fuzzy” match rather than the stronger exact match option.
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