Reputation Armor

You may run a squeaky clean business and you may have the best intentions in the world, but there are many risk factors when it comes to your Employees and how they can negatively impact your businesses reputation.

Employees shape your reputation everyday and sometimes in a negative way. It is important to implement an internal “Reputation Management” program that informs employees how their actions at work and away from work can affect your businesses reputation. You must hold employees accountable for their actions that may impact your reputation.

Examples of how an employee can ruin your businesses reputation.

1. Confidentiality: You may trust your employees with a lot of information on how your business is ran internally and they may know your profit margins, bookkeeping practices, your personal issues (Private Life). It is important to require employees to sign a confidentiality/non-disclosure agreement. Include details on what information about your business and management can and cannot be shared. An employee may share information that can tarnish how consumers perceive your business.
2. Employee Conduct outside of the workplace. Employees just like everyone else in the world they can make mistakes. If there is negative media attention targeting an employee, it may trickle down to your business. If an employee has a negative 15 minutes in the media it is best to distance yourself from the media buzz by distancing yourself from the employee. Termination of the employee and a press release about the termination might be the ticket.
3. Are your employees being friendly and not fake? One big issue that ever customer service business has is how employees treat customers in person and on the phone. Fake is not friendly! You MUST teach your employees how to be actual friendly customer service agents, no matter what type of business you are in. Nothing angers people more than a sarcastic friendliness.
4. Employees’ online social network participation can be a concern. What your employees say and do on social networks can impact your company’s image and reputation. Many social networks like Facebook allow users (prompts them) to disclose where they work in the occupation section, which will tie your company name in with their profile. Monitor your employee’s online social networking activities.

You obviously cannot control every aspect of your employee’s life and decide who they are outside of work, you can however lay down certain employee conduct rules within your employment agreement or contracts. If anything make certain your employees are aware that the way they handle themselves at work and away can affect their employment status and your businesses reputation.

This is a very important tip and somewhat a warning to those looking in to hiring a reputation management firm. It is VERY important that YOU secure your business name as domain names before someone (including reputation management firms) else does. It is a widespread tactic and practice that competitors, disgruntle customers, and even reputation management firms use.

The reasons a reputation management firm may get your-business.com and why they want it:

As part of our service (for our clients) we may advise them to, or register for them, domain names. Example: yourbusinesname.com, yourbusinesname.net, yourbusinesname.org. The reason we need these domains is that they will easily rank well on Google eventually and hopefully bury the negative links that you don’t like.

The reason it is important to secure these names is several (not all) reputation management companies will buy your-name.com regardless if you sign-up with them or not. Their hopes are that you will eventually have to turn to them to buy your domain name or hire them to do the reputation management job.

If your business domains fall in to the wrong hands it can be very damaging. These keyword rich domains will grab very, VERY strong positions on Google and if you don’t control them you are at high risk for an old fashion extortion scheme.

How to protect yourself and your business:

Register the following domain names and simply replace “your-business” with your business name.

Your-Business.com
Your-Business.net

Your-Business.org
Your-Business.us
Your-Business.name

Your-Business.biz

Your-Business.info

Your-Business.tv

You can do more “dot whatever”, just register what you can and start with the .com, .net, and .org.

If a reputation management firm needs to use the domain for your campaign simply point the domain to their server (hosting). This way if things don’t work out you ultimately control the domain name.

Clients of reputation armor have the option to register their own domain names and if they fail to do so, we will do it for the sake of their campaign. After the first year of service we will email the client to transfer ownership unless they request it prior to that time.

Reputation Armor received several calls a week from businesses that are having issues with positive 4+ star Yelp.com reviews being filtered and not viible to visitors of their yelp listing.

The big question is why does Yelp filter reviews and what can trigger a good review to be filtered?

Based off of our (Reputation Armor’s) research it was found that yelp reviews (goos ones and bad ones) can be filtered for many reasons. Some of the reasons are listed below:

-Your company has put “good” reviews on yelp immediately after a bad one was filed on yelp. A good review immediately following a bad one has the characteristics of foul play within yelps eyes.

-A user has flagged your good reviews and yelp looked in to it and feels it may be false review trying to combat a bad review.

-You are getting to many reviews and it does not look natural to Yelp. It you normally get 1-2 reviews a month and then all of a sudden you get 10 in one month, Yelp will filter some of the because it is not natural looking.

- The same IP address (computer) is trying to post multiple reviews. Yelp can tell that your computer has been there before. They will filter duplicate user or IP reviews (Good or Bad).

-The location of your computer might play a role. If you are in Salem VA, and trying to review a restaurant in LA, then a restaurant in NC, yelp may  think they are false reviews since your computer is sitting in VA.

-Too good to be true? Most reviews online are negative in nature. Not many people go out of their way to say good things about a company unless they are pushed to do so. Yelp is not made up of idiots; they are quite smart and have put hundreds of thousands of dollars in coding to ensure real reviews go live. It is apparent that any GOOD review will go through a greater verification process and maybe a live moderator will read it. If your review sounds over zealous it may get filtered.

-Using a proxy (hiding your true IP) might get god reviews filtered. Proxies are shared with others and yelp might stay up to speed with the newest proxies and give them no creditability.

In Yelp’s Own Words:

“Here at Yelp, we’re trying to connect people with great local businesses. Providing consumers with trusted review content is critical to this mission. One question we occasionally get asked on this topic is why reviews sometimes “disappear” from a business page. While the overwhelming majority of reviews aren’t affected, we figured this might be a good time to offer some specifics on why reviews sometimes don’t appear on business pages (and why we think this helps make Yelp the most useful consumer review site around).”

“Yelp has an automated Review Filter that many people are surprised to learn was put in place soon after our big launch in 2005. Of course, it’s evolved over the years; it’s an algorithm our engineers are constantly working on. Its purpose, however, remains the same: to protect consumers and business owners from fake, shill or malicious reviews.”

Conclusion: If you need help managing a yelp review issue please contact us at 1-888-358-2766 x 701

Using a Blog as a reputation management tool is very common. Blogs rank well on Google, they are easy to update and manage, and you can get a new blog online within 30 Minutes or less.

Most bloggers use Wordpress because of how easy it is to install and manage. Wordpress is a free blogging platform that you can install with very little experience.

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes.

Many online reputation companies including Reputation Armor use wordpress for their clients and internally to create high ranking websites. The blog you are reading now uses wordpress.

It is very easy to get started with wordpress all you need is to Download Wordpress, a domain name (YourSiteHere.com), and a hosting services like Hostgator or whoever you choose.

To run WordPress your host just needs a couple of things:

PHP version 4.3 or greater
MySQL version 4.1.2 or greater

Once you have a domain name you will need to point it to your hosting company’s DNS (Namservers), add the domain name to your hosting account, create an FTP account (easy), create a database name in your hosting control panel, upload the wordpress files you downloaded from Wordpress.org, and change the wp-config file in a text editor and save the changes. Now you are ready to blog. It may sound like a lot to do technically, but it is VERY easy. Wordpress has instructions and you will figure it out! Just dive right in and give it a try.

Client testimonials can help your online reputation if they are believable. When you are adding testimonials that are sent from clients or readers of your blog try not to edit the testimonials so much that they do not appear natural.  

It’s much more credible to leave a testimonial in the person’s original text. When a company “cleans-up” the text, the reader may notice and might put less faith in what it says. It’s much more realistic when left complete with (a few) typos, ramblings, and other natural expressions (unless it’s really difficult to understand or contains profanity. In that case, it can definitely benefit from some cleaning up!)

Do not add fake testimonials on your site and remember not to over use this reputation management tactic.

Fake testimonials are obvious is most cases and too many “great” testimonials can be unbelievable. Pepper your testimonials or reviews with some neutral ones to make them look more credible. Let readers see that you accept all feedback. Certainly do not publish a disgruntled customers outrages rank as a testimonial, just keep it as natural as possible.

Over the past few weeks, ReputationArmor.com has had great success at having negative information about our clients removed from websites and search results. View the case stats below:

Total Rip Off Reports Pushed Back or Removed: 12
ComplaintsBoard links displaced: 4
Total Review Sites (Yelp, CitySearch, MerchantCircle): 4
Total .gov news links displaced: 2
Total Negative Blogs Removed/Displaced: 6
Total News Stories Removed/Retracted/Displaced/Edited: 7
Negative Image Take Downs: 2
Copyright take downs: 8
Other displacement: 10+

Total Blogs Created For Clients: 129
Total Sites Create: 335
Total Pages Of Content Created: Over 12,000

All of the stats below have taken place over the past few weeks 4-6 weeks for our clients. Reputation Armor can help you with your online reputation management needs. Please contact us at 888-358-2766

First of all, Reputation Armor will take a look at how Google describes PageRank

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important””

So Google basically describes PageRank as the domino effect from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the on the net. A backlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined by and depends on the amount and PageRank of all pages that link to it (”incoming links”).

Google assigns a ranking from 0-10 for each page; this PageRank reflects a site’s significance in the eyes of Google. The PageRank of a particular page is more or less based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the PageRank of the pages providing the links. Other factors include, but are not limited to, relevance of search words on the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the PageRank. In order to prevent manipulation and Spamdexing, Google does not provide explicit details about other factors that influence PageRank.

The History Of PageRank

Contrary to most users’ beliefs, the “Page” in PageRank does not stand for the page of the ranking; instead it was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page and soon after Sergey Brin as a component of a research project about a new type of search engine.

The Next Google PageRank Update

If Google maintains the schedule of previous PageRank updates, then Reputation Armor expects to see the next update to take place sometime between June 30^th and July 7^th.

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No reputation management campaign is absolute without Google, or Google Profiles.

What is Google Profiles? It’s your personal profile and hub on the Google index. Whenever someone Google’s your name they will notice your profile at the bottom of the search results for your name – along with the profiles of anyone who shares your name. Why use Google Profiles? It isn’t just because it shows up on Google for your individual name.

There’s much more to Google Profiles than merely listing your name and showing your latest headshot photo. You can also incorporate the links to all the places online where you can be found. You can link to your Facebook profile, YouTube channel, and your Twitter feed, your websites and any place else online. If it’s significant and it’s about you then you can link to it. That’s what makes Google Profiles such a great reputation management tool.

If you do not use Google Profiles yet – You should sign-up and link to other pages about your personal name. It only takes a few minutes and will help! Remember Google Profiles is for your individual name, not your business name.

Reputation  Management and social networks like FaceBook and Twitter go hand in hand. What about MySpace? MySpace.com used to be the big dog in the social networking world and was considered the #1 social site in the world. MySpace is still a great website and will remain very popular, however MySpace is not the most professional place to network if you are a business or a business professional.

MySpace profiles are usually tricked out with bling, music, and funky themes, which appeals more to kids and the younger generation. When I hit a MySpace profile it usually reminds me of being in a nightclub full of underage drinkers. When I drop by other profiles like ones found on facebook and twitter, I feel a little less confused and distracted.

MySpace is still a good tool for reputation management in the sense that the profile might outrank something negative. After playing around on MySpace for a few months Reputation Armor has decided not to use the site anymore.

If you are looking to create a social presence for your company try out list of social networks.

What is Reputation Armor?

Reputation Armor (ReputationArmor.com) specializes in manipulating the search engine results our clients favor. Reputation Armor is one of the leading online reputation management firms and can help protect, repair, and build your online reputation, which includes such services as Removing Ripoff Reports, Complaintsboard, Yelp, PissedConsumer, ShamScam, and any other site that may contain negative information about an individual or their company.

No company is impervious to getting harmful comments or complaints online. Some of the largest brands in the world have negative information that appears high on Google search results. Reputation Armor offers a great example of how a 1 website or negative entry can tarnish your online reputation: the website PayPalSucks.com. This website ranks in the top 10 results on the first page of Google when you search the term “PayPal”. There are also dozens of other online negatives that appear when you search for “paypal” online.

The point that Reputation Armor tries to make is no company is perfect and every company has someone out there that does not like them. In some cases people go far out of their way and invest a lot of time to ruin another company’s online image. Having negative information online about your business is not the end of the world and it can be corrected or at least made less damaging. Reputation Armor has been in the online reputation management industry for over ten years.

The Reputation Armor solution is to bury these negative items deeper within search results. By pushing negative comments and mentions of your company deeper within search results you will regain your positive image. Reputation Armor knows has found it to be fact that only a small segment of internet users go past the first 2 pages of Google when they search for something or someone. If you can maneuver the negative links to go further down and the positive links up, then you have accomplished the most important aspect of reputation management.

Do you need reputation armor?

The best way to view your online reputation as potential clients will is to simply search your name or company name on Google. See what shows up on the first 2 pages of Google, if there are negative mentions of your business that might make a potential client think twice about doing business with you, then you may need reputation armor s help.

Reputation Armor is a company that can assist you with protecting your online images and repairing your online reputation.

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