A Quick and Dirty Way To Resurrect Your Reputation on Google
By Anna Johnson on February 17th, 2009Actually, what I’m about to describe may not necessarily be all that quick… but it’s probably as quick as it can be…
Silicon Alley Insider published an amusing article on what to do if you search on your name on Google and discover that the top results about you are unflattering.
It occurred to me that the same tips for resurrecting your ‘Google reputation’ could equally apply to your website, brand name, product name, etc.
In fact, they pretty much summarize a strategy for getting high rankings in Google in the first place. Here they are:
1. Don’t ask Google for help because the company won’t help you.
2. Create your own content. A lot of it. And put it on different sites, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, your own blog, etc. Cross-link it all.
3. Boost your LinkedIn or Facebook results by publishing articles on sites such as Squidoo.com, eHow.com or Google Knol and link back to your (LinkedIn or Facebook) profile pages.
4. Get your own name blog i.e. yourname.com and have as many sites as possible (Facebook, Twitter, etc) link to your homepage.
Now, following these tips will likely boost your ranking, but it may not be for long. As mentioned in the Silicon Alley Insider article, doing all the above may not be enough, at first, to overcome such natural SEO disadvantages as having a new website (i.e. Google favors webpages that have been on the Internet for a long time).
On that basis, here’s my fifth tip:
5. Keep ‘working’ your blog and other content pages. In other words, continue to add more content.
For better or worse, search engine optimization is a bit like getting fit – you have to keep on doing it to achieve and then maintain the results you want. Once you stop, your results suffer.
Source: Eric Krangel, “How To Rehabilitate Your Name On Google,” Silicon Alley Insider, February 5, 2009
