As owners of business, we often worry about our online reputation. A negative online reputation can be disastrous for a business from an SEO perspective. It is extremely difficult to recover from such terrible place and start ranking high again.
We will talk about managing online reputation in a later blog. First, let us learn how to gauge your online reputation. How do we find out if it is good or bad? How do we know how Google views our website’s reputation?
Well, we do not need to go much far to learn that. Google Search Evaluator Guidelines talks about it in details and tells us how they try to assess a website’s reputation. They talk about it in section 2.6.4 of the guidelines.
Assess a website’s online reputation
Step 1: Find the homepage of the website.
In many cases, you could reach a website’s homepage by going to the domain name. In some cases, it may be a sub-domain like https://finance.yahoo.com.
Step 2: Google your reputation
Let’s say you are trying to assess reputation of the website ibm.com. Below is how Google suggests you go about it. If you do not know advanced search tactics in Google search, you can learn about it from our blog here and here.
2.a. Find brand reputation
We start with finding the brand’s reputation. We can do this with a basic search for the brand name.
Search for [ibm -site:ibm.com] and [“ibm.com” -site:ibm.com]. We are basically telling Google to search for the keyword ibm and ibm.com but DO NOT show results from ibm.com. This would show us all the webpages where the word ibm or ibm.com is mentioned outside of its own domain.
There is however a catch in this. Many webmasters now pay up different writers to write positive reviews about their websites. So, fake positive reviews by owners and fake negative reviews by competitors are a commonplace now.
So, Google asks its evaluators to focus on content from respectable, trustworthy sources. Look for articles, references, recommendations by experts, and other credible information.
2.b. Find reviews online from reputable sources.
Search for [ibm reviews -site:ibm.com] and [“ibm.com” reviews -site:ibm.com]. This search should give results where ibm.com or ibm is mentioned with reviews. Look for reputable websites as they are less likely to sell a fake review.
Step 3: Setup Google alerts
Google Alerts lets you know when a new mention occurs of the brand you are tracking. So, whenever google bots detect a new page with your brand mention, it’ll send you an email with the details.
Suggested readings
If you are interested in knowing more about it, we give you some suggested readings on this topic:
- 12 ways to monitor your reputation online
- Definitive guide to online reputation management
- Role of SEO in Online Reputation Management
– Practics.in team
At Practics.in, we pride ourselves on being great at what we do, i.e. SEO and Content Mktg. We understand search engines and content well enough to help businesses get the most out of their online presence. We can help you rank high on relevant searches by your potential customers.
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