Thread: How exactly does online reputation management work?

I saw this job posting the other day where the job poster said that a simple Google search of his name brings up some really bad results. He wanted his online reputation to be made better.

I just wonder, how does online reputation management work exactly?

Do you join every single website (we're talking about blogs, forums, Yahoo! answers and the like) that the person is being talked about and defend him? If so, do people really listen to a newbie-poster/stranger?

Google search engine wants to offer users the most relevant and informative results it can for a given search term. If the search term is ‘Your company name’ and the reviews page on which you’re commenting is receiving more and more content, updating daily, with more and mentions of your company name, what do you think Google will do to that result? It will rank it higher in the SERPs, meaning even more people will see it. Before you know it, your negative review will be a threat to down your entire company.

A negative review that nobody reads is no longer a problem, and this is where reputation management comes in. The best way to deal with a negative result in Google is to make sure it doesn’t rank at all, and you can do that by harnessing the power of SEO to control the SERPs for your chosen search terms, so that negative reviews that do occur don’t even show up on the first page.

You may even come up with the idea of creating fake profiles on the reviews websites themselves and posting positive reviews of your company, in the hope that by adding plenty of positive reviews, the good will outweigh the bad.