Learn How Best SEO Practices Can Help With Reputation Management

But reputation is no longer formed by word-of-mouth among neighbors or the front pages of newspapers; it is built up or torn apart in the vast landscape of the digital world. A brand's reputation can now be tarnished on so many different platforms, like high-authority websites, social networks, business listings, review sites, blog posts, to even a Wikipedia entry. Maintaining a positive online presence across all of these digital locations is a huge task. Reputation managers do the hard work of shaping a brand’s narrative across all of them, ensuring that negative content doesn’t take a more permanent hold in the search engine results pages.

The first place that consumers go to discover new products or services is search engines like Google. What they discover about your brand on the first page of results will likely be a determining factor in their purchase decision. When a PR crisis unfolds, a public relations team can certainly do damage control, but it takes a nuanced understanding of search engine algorithms to make sure those unflattering news articles or poor reviews don’t show up in Google for years to come when users type in your business name into their search bar.

Unlike other digital marketing efforts -- content strategy, link building, paid media -- reputation management focuses on the digital assets of which your brand has no control over. No company can fully influence what others choose to say, write, or publish about them online, but you can use SEO techniques to shape online narratives to your advantage.

Reputation Management is a growing digital marketing service as more individuals, companies, and brands go through the difficult experience of receiving a barrage of negative attention on the internet. The more well-known and influential your company, the more essential it is to have a strategic and highly intentional reputation management strategy.

This reality speaks to a broader family of problems which Google has been considering and is commonly referred to as, “The Right to be Forgotten.” Many have advocated for a legal right to request to have private information removed from Google or search engines under specific circumstances. When someone dies, or something negative happens in their life and they want to move on from it, they often can’t, because every time someone Googles them, there is a storehouse of online information about it. Their identity becomes tightly coupled to the negative story or incident. Despite their growing application, “Right to Be Forgotten,” laws are still being discussed in regards to their implications on free speech, censorship, and personal privacy.

Versions of "The Right to be Forgotten,” have been applied in both European and Argentinian courts, but in the United States, no law has been implemented, despite 9 out of 10 Americans wanting some form of the practice. Unfortunately, we are still a long way from any law granting individuals or brands more agency in getting information removed from search results if deemed “inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, excessive and not related to discourse regarding the public interest.”

Google’s 2009 Caffeine update did make it so the algorithm considers the age of news and articles when they think of how relevant they are to users’ queries. As a result, negative articles are less likely to rank as time passes. But this doesn't necessarily help out those who haven’t gotten any new positive publicity since the time of the original bad press, meaning there are no recent, positive digital locations to outrank those negative results.

According to Forbes, Google received nearly 850,000 requests to remove information or links between 2014 and 2019. Without more societal agreement or public policy action, the problem is not going away anytime soon. Until then, there are different ways to use SEO and digital PR to get these negative items removed and keep your online identity in better standing.

Many brands get very concerned about bad social media mentions or negative reviews on popular review sites like TrustPilot, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. This type of negative attention can be frustrating, but it doesn't have nearly the long-term impact that negative search results do.

Why? Because search results linger. Although Google rankings are not permanent, influencing them doesn't happen overnight. It's why brands and corporations team up with SEO reputation management agencies: They hope to shape the narratives communicated by the search results for their brand. 


In this ebook, I’m going to address the multiple places where an online reputation can be harmed and some of the techniques reputation managers use to repair the damage. However, the important thing to keep in mind is that the top focus of all brands should be influencing what appears in search results, because it is the most influential digital location for your online brand. Here’s why:

It’s the first place customers go

93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine, and Google owns over 90% of the search engine market share

Customers do their research

80% of people perform some type of research online before choosing a product or service

Bad search results cost customers

One survey estimates that the presence of three negative articles in a search query has the potential to lose almost 60% of customers

As a result, sometimes the work needs to be outsourced to an online reputation management company. The best option is a reputation management firm that is also skilled in providing SEO services, as they are better equipped to implement the different strategies that help shape what appears in Google results.

ADepending on the nature of your crisis or the type of business you have, you can likely find a reputable firm that specializes in the reputation management service that is the best choice for your specific needs. At LinkGraph, we specialize in using advanced SEO techniques to help maintain brand reputation across a variety of digital locations. Here is a brief summary of all the services that online reputation managers (or reputation management software) can offer businesses today.

Build Reputations

Online reputation management companies can help newer business owners build and grow their online reputation. From link building to local SEO citations to content marketing, they implement the best practices of digital marketing strategy to help your brand awareness or your own website gain visibility. Some of these growth strategies may include:

Search engine optimization

Blogger outreach

Email Marketing

Content marketing

Influencer Marketing

Local Citations

Social Media profile creation

PPC Management

Manage Reputations

If your brand has been around for awhile, you've most likely used a Google alert to stay on top of your brand mentions to see what is being said about you across online platforms in real time. But as your brand grows, the more complex this task becomes. Likely, your in-house team members are focused on the content on your company's website and don't have the resources or time to monitor the online visibility of other web properties that mention your business. Online reputation services for managing reputations may include:

Review Management

Review Acquisition

Guest Author and Blogging

Social Media Marketing

Web Development

Great content creation

Online Forums Monitoring

SMS Marketing

Repair Reputations

When a brand suddenly gets a rush of bad press from all angles, online reputation management firms go to work quickly. There can be hundreds of new online properties with inaccurate, misleading, or negative information. With so many syndications, online communities, and defamers on the web, negative items can quickly get out of control. A brand with a good name can suddenly have slander appearing in Google SERPs, local listings, or social profiles right as the potential buyer is trying to gather more information about that brand or company across different channels. Reputation management campaigns can mitigate the damage via:

Reverse SEO

Website Design or New Pages

Thought Leader Opportunities

Review Generation

Social Media Marketing

Reputation Crisis management

Social Media Content

New Positive Online Content

Bad Press or Publicity on Reputable Publications

Anyone who has an elementary understanding of SEO knows that domain authority is king. Site authority is the #1 ranking factor, so those websites with lots of backlinks are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. It may sting a little to get bad press on a small news blog, but bad publicity in a reputable, dominant publication like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal? That is a nightmare scenario for any brand that can cause serious damage.

In addition to having high domain authority, these publications also have high traffic, large audiences, staff authors with highly-engaged Twitter followings, and can easily secure long-term SEO rankings. It’s the same reason why public relations teams devote tons of resources to showcase the positive information about their brands through press releases. They hope that these top publications will write positive things about them. The digital footprint of these reputable publications is simply massive, which is why the type of content that appears on these high-authority publications can make or break a brand’s image.

Google does have a sense of when someone is specifically searching for news and will show stories from the past 7-14 days if it deems the user is looking for more recent articles. After an article is no longer ‘newsworthy,’ or users are not searching for it as frequently, then Google decides whether they want to put that in search results based on the typical SEO factors.

However, these major publications rank for millions of organic keywords. Their negative articles that mention your brand can just keep on showing up. For example, look what appears on the first page for the search query, "tesla product reviews."

Or see what prospective employees will find on the first page when they search, "What's it like to work at Amazon?"

With their respective domain authorities of 94 and 96, it’s no surprise that web pages from the Washington Post and Medium are still finding their way to the first page of the SERPs, even though it’s been years since the original publication dates of the negative articles.

In some ways, journalists do negative SEO. They may not realize that’s what they are doing, but the pieces they write can linger for a long time in the search results, particularly if those staff authors work at reputable, more well-known publications.

Launch every PR campaign you want, but ultimately, when a crisis at your organization occurs and it’s considered “news,” these publications will write about you. There’s little you can do to prevent it, but there is a lot you can do to alleviate the long-term consequences.

Inaccurate or Bad Information on Wikipedia

Wikipedia pages appear in almost half of all searches, so if your brand is big enough to have one, it will very likely appear in the SERPs for keyword queries with your brand name, and most likely on the first page. If you have any key stakeholders or well-known executives who also have Wikipedia pages, any information that's false, exaggerated, or unflattering can have an impact on overall customer sentiment and whether or not someone chooses to make a purchase.

Although going to Wikipedia is not the first thing most people do when looking for new products or services, it is a very common internet reference site. When someone wants comprehensive information or details about a subject's history, the easiest way to get it online is to go to Wikipedia, even though it contains user-generated material and often has inaccuracies.

The process for building a Wikipedia page for your business is not complicated, but it is unlikely to be approved if you're a small business or brand that doesn't have a wide influence. If your business reputation does warrant a page, then take note that submitting revisions can take a lot of time. Wikipedia discourages businesses from submitting revisions because they want pages to be unbiased and non-promotional. But if there are inaccuracies or violations of privacy, you can certainly make a case to their community of volunteers who approves or denies edits as to why a change needs to be made.

The Wikipedia page for my former company had some false information, and although it bothered me personally, it ultimately did not put our good reputation or online image at risk in the long run. Use your own discretion as when an edit is warranted.

Some online reputation management services strictly specialize in building and editing Wikipedia pages. There is also software that will send alerts when changes are made to your Wikipedia page so you can be continually reviewing those edits for false or negative information. Strategically placed backlinks on Wikipedia pages can also have SEO benefits, and some online marketers specialize in these types of SEO services.

Take note that if the negative information included in the page is a big part of your brand history or had a wide-ranging, long-term impact on the general public, it's unlikely that Wikipedia will approve any edits. The reality of negative situations and crises is that they do sometimes make their way into the historical record. For business or personal brands in these circumstances, it’s better to instead try and push other digital locations higher in the SERPs to rank above Wikipedia or to create reference or resource pages on your own site that can rank for branded searches.

Negative Buzz or Trends on Social Media

Although challenging or harmful in the short-term, reputation attacks on social channels like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn are more temporary and are not usually reflected in the SERPs. Google does not look to social signals as much for rankings, so it’s unlikely those negative social media posts or engagements on your Facebook page will last much longer beyond that exact moment in time. Also, because social media algorithms have strong recency signals, the negative buzz or trending negative attention often disappears as suddenly as it arrives.

A great example of this is when a video of a United Airlines passenger being dragged from his seat on an overbooked flight went viral on Twitter. The video reappeared on a variety of social media channels, spurred a bunch of negative news articles, was covered by multiple television media outlets, and was eventually followed by a lawsuit from the upset customer.

Although it may seem like a bad experience documented across social platforms would cause permanent damage to brand image, it's clear that United Airlines is continuing to earn new customers, get great reviews, and has not suffered in their lead generation.

Corporations are often really concerned about the hubbub of social media and solely focus on mitigating negative PR, but the ability of social media sites to impact those companies is a little overstated. For a small business or B2B brand, the impact is a bit more weighty, but usually after the negative mentions have their moment in the spotlight on social sites, the overall reputation of the company goes back to what the average person thinks about them and their already earned customer loyalty.

If they have a positive reputation overall, the damage to corporate reputation is minimal and can usually be overcome with strong social media monitoring and an honest, transparent, carefully crafted public relations response across social accounts. If the company does business poorly or has a bad product though, that’s a long-term problem. They’ll likely always have negative social media unless they improve as a service provider.

When a company slips on a banana peel and people throw tomatoes at them cause they’ve done something off, social media will lampoon them for a couple weeks. And if a searcher sets out to specifically find references to these negative experiences or dig up past social media comments, or unflattering customer feedback, they will find them.

But all of that stuff eventually fades into the cosmic background noise of the universe and it’s just gone. SEO is the exception -- it lingers. As stated earlier, Google search results play the biggest role in business reputation. Think about the primary ways that your customers find you, and design a reputation management and marketing strategy that is proactive in preventing them from ever seeing those negative results in their customer journey.

There are some reputation management tactics you can perform on your own company website without needing the help of a third-party. However, you do need a good understanding of ranking factors and the judgment to determine what strategies will apply best to the situation.

The fundamental building blocks of search engine optimization can be used as reputation management tools. The primary distinction though between the two is that SEO is concerned about the onsite content of your own website while reputation management SEO attempts to influence the rankings of multiple web pages across many different sites. The most effective approaches will depend on your particular brand, your target market, the size of your digital presence, and the type of pages you aim to promote or demote in search results.

#1 Optimize the On-Page Content

Sometimes it's best to go back to the SEO basics. Optimizing the content on any webpage for the keyword you’re targeting is an easy and effective way to boost that page’s rankings. Having better SEO on your blog posts, landing pages, meta descriptions, or existing digital assets is the simplest way to get the content on your site ranking higher in searches with your brand name.

You obviously can't change the content of all other online properties, but you can optimize the content on those web pages that your business has the ability to modify and improve -- such as your profiles on third party review sites or social media platforms. You can use our landing page optimizer tool to not only optimize your own content, but to find the focus terms that will help a piece of content off-site rank higher for the same target keyword where the negative content ranks. Add content that includes those focus terms to push those positive digital locations higher in organic search results.

#2 Boost Authority of Positive Web Pages with Backlinks

Google is more likely to rank pages with more backlinks, so launching link building efforts to get positive digital assets ranking higher is a great way to mitigate negative search results. Creating original pieces of content that link to those off-site pieces of content you want to rank higher is a foundational tactic of online reputation management services.

This can sound simple, but if that negative news article is ranking in the first result instead of the 8th or 9th, it's going to take a lot more work and resources boosting the authority of those multiple digital properties before that bad result gets knocked off the first page. This is why full-service digital agencies like LinkGraph can provide reputation management services as well. We have the infrastructure to do link acquisition at scale.

If your site has high domain authority, having a dedicated landing page on your site for your positive press coverage is a great way to use the power of your own site authority to pass link juice to those positive digital locations. Remember, content that appears on news sites will eventually drop off the SERPs due to Google's caffeine update unless they have strong SEO analytics, so the more backlinks coming to them from reputable websites, the more likely those web pages will move up the results and stick around for the long term.

#3 PR to Earn New Positive Coverage

Although PR firms cannot guarantee that your top search results always project a positive light on your brand reputation, they still play an important role in earning the type of online properties that hold major SEO power. Publicity teams actively seeking out press coverage are particularly advantageous because Google’s recency signals with news articles means new coverage can quickly overtake any negative material that is currently ranking.

Entrepreneur online profiles, founder biographies, general business profiles, and thought leader pieces are all likely to rank well when someone searches for your company name. Your PR firm or team should be constantly seeking out these opportunities that are good for your brand's image and SEO in both normal times and in times of a damaged reputation.

#4 Paid Search Marketing Campaigns to Intercept Clicks

Although this is one of the more expensive options, paid search campaigns are an easy way to immediately rank above those digital locations you have concerns about.

Paid search ads intercept 46% of the clicks away from organic rankings across all online searches, meaning you can steer those users away from those negative news articles and toward your business website. This can work for a little bit (i.e. long enough for that negative coverage to lose its recency and relevancy signals) but it is not a long-term solution if the negative content remains in a top spot in the SERPs.

Very few brands have an unlimited budget to be constantly running Google Ads campaigns -- which are very expensive. But SEO takes time and doesn't happen overnight. Until you secure higher rankings for those positive digital assets or your onsite content, paid media can be an essential tool in SEO reputation management for the short term.

The same SEO strategies that can be used to help digital locations rank higher can also be used to push them off the first page. Google relies on the same signals and ranking factors, regardless of whether the intention is noble or nefarious. These techniques are commonly referred to as black-hat SEO, because some new businesses and sites use them to trick Google into thinking they are high-quality sites with reputable, organic links, so the search engine will rank them higher.

Google red flags and penalizes any site that appears to be engaging in black hat seo, which is why the same techniques can be used to drag web content off the SERPs. The best reputation management companies focus on the brighter side of SEO reputation management to avoid ethical concerns. Still, it’s important to be aware that these types of reputation management services are being readily provided by freelancers. When it comes to my own marketing agency, we prefer to stay on the right side of the force.

#1 Spammy Links

Backlinks from low-quality urls or websites without industry relevance to the linked page will look like black-hat tactics to Google crawlers. As a result, search engine reputation management abusers who want to kick a web property off page one of the SERPS will build hundreds of these low-quality backlinks from sites from private blog networks with low DA, website traffic, and other SEO weaknesses.

The negative assets that are the greatest risk to a business's online reputation though usually have strong site authority and won’t come down with a few bad links. However, there are link farms and providers who have the capabilities to build thousands of toxic links to take them down, and at discount prices. It is certainly not a noble internet reputation management strategy, but there are people who utilize it without guilt to repair their negative reputations.

#2 Comment Spam

Comment spam is another common negative SEO tactic that can push websites off the SERPs. By leaving comments on private blog networks that link to the negative news article or digital asset, Google will red flag that web page because of the lack of relevancy and quality of those backlinks. Comment spam is one of many different things black hat SEOs can do to build toxic links, but it is one of the more common types, because it can be easily done by people or bots.

#3 Unnatural Anchor Text

If a backlink has anchor text that doesn't have contextual relevance to the linked site, Google will also recognize this as a nefarious tactic and penalize the site that has the bad backlink. Lots of backlinks with irrelevant, unnatural, or even explicit anchor text is very bad for SEO rankings, as it confuses Google about what a website's content is about.

When someone wants to quickly repair a negative online reputation, they can build tons of links with bad anchor text to try and get Google to push that digital asset lower. If your own website ever gets an influx of backlinks with nefarious anchor text, it's your signal that someone is trying to influence how Google ranks your own content.

In a few cases, yes, but in most cases, not at all. Professional and personal lives have experienced extensive collateral damage from the negative content published about them on the internet. Often, the level of vitriol, anger, or criticism they receive is not always appropriate to the size or impact of the original wrong-doing. Also, some individuals use the internet as a means of extortion, meaning the bad information we see about others may have been intentionally placed there to harm innocent people.

All brands, individuals, and businesses are bound to face obstacles, but does every mishap deserve to result in a permanent, long-term negative reputation online, particularly if the brand or individual is generally respected and has made amends with those they may have harmed? Not everyone will answer that question the same way when it comes to corporations, but if we experienced a tarnished reputation ourselves, the majority of us would want the opportunity to move forward and do better.

The role that internet content plays in shaping the perceptions we have of businesses and brands, of influential people and ordinary ones, is more powerful than it has ever been before. It is one of the challenges we are still trying to work through (as a society and as digital marketers), which is why we should maintain an ethical consciousness and lens when doing this kind of work.

Every circumstance will have its own nuances to consider when deciding how to use the SEO forces in a fair and good way. The existing versions of the “Right to be Forgotten,” law state that those negative items that have to do with public interest and welfare should not have a legal right to be removed. In my opinion, this is a good benchmark for reputation managers as they determine what specific narratives we should and shouldn’t try to suppress in the search rankings.

If you’re not quite sure where your online reputation stands, a great place to start is with LinkGraph’s free reputation analysis. We use our proprietary software to gain insights on which keywords and digital locations your reputation needs some work or repair. As a digital marketing agency, we have comprehensive expertise to monitor the entirety of your digital footprint, from social media platforms, online review sites, to the first page of the SERPs. Our SEO reputation management services can help make sure your brand image is cast in the best possible light wherever it appears on the web.

Always remember that search results are the most important reputation signals for your brand. They will be shown to users just as they are actively searching for information that will influence their choices about whether to make a purchase or use your services. It is vital to make sure your potential customers have a good experience at every part of the customer journey, but particularly the starting point. In today’s digital marketplace, that beginning is most likely to start on a search engine like Bing or Google.