This one is one of the most overlooked and important parts of any Internet Strategy. You can be listed high on Google and other search engines, do social marketing, but if there are bad things said about you or your business online, you have to act. Search engine results are almost like credit ratings these days. The problem is that most individuals or businesses who are victims of character defamation and bad reviews are not even aware of it.

First, you should begin to run your name and the name of your business and key employees through Google to see if anything negative comes up.

Once you have an overview, you should set up Google alerts for all relevant names you want to monitor. Google will inform you by email, every time a new listing with your business or individual name will be indexed.

If you are victim of anything negative that comes up in searches, you have several options.

-Contact the search engines to take it out of their searches

-Contact the site webmaster ask them to take it offline

-Push it out of site by adding more sites that list your individual or business name.

The first option to contact the search engines is the one with the least chance of success. Even if you can get it off, it will be a lengthy process, sodon’t invest too much time or frustration into this option.

The second option, to contact a webmaster, has in some cases, a much higher chance of success. This depends on your negotiation skills. Sometimes it works wonders to offer the site owner to pay for a small ad on their site.

The third option is in general, the way to go. Most online services that offer to help you with negative entries use this strategy. They list your business on as many sites as possible in the hope to push negative search listings to page 4 or 5 where nobody reads it. They mostly use free directories, blog comments and forums.