In my area I am a well known businessman and I have over the years built up a great reputation online but unfortunately this all changed last year. I was falsely accused of tax evasion, and despite being acquitted by the courts and despite receiving a full and unreserved apology, my name laid in tatters thanks to the internet. The problem is that if enough people read a news article about you that is negative, it can become big news which ends up meaning that more and more people end up linking to the article. Before you know it this is a trusted document in the eyes of the search engines, because they can see that a lot of people have read it, and a lot of people have thought it worthy of linking their own site to it.
Fortunately for me, I came across a company who specialises in ridding the search results pages of sites which in reality shouldn’t be sitting at the top of the page when people search my name!!
The company, called ReputationManagementConsultants.com asked me what terms I wanted to rank for in the search engine results. Once we had decided together what terms would be best for me and were most relevant to my business they set about changing the search results. They went about this by various different means, such as optimising my own site, by creating links to other sites which were positively discussing my business, and by creating link bait campaigns which aimed at making people link to my site in return for the opportunity to win prizes. I have to say that I was dubious at first about the possibility of all this working, but I can happily say that a year on, and the nay-sayers have all but disappeared from the results!