Link Building for Reputation Management

Reputation Management, at its foundation, is about controlling where negative content is displayed about your business on search engines like Google. Control of negative content is considered to be successful when the targeted negative information does not show up on the first three pages of search results. This is considered as successful reputation management due to well defined habits of people that use search engines. Less than one percent of search engine users venture past page three, meaning that the negative content has been effectively buried at this point.

One of the main activities that takes place during a successful reputation management campaign is the building of inbound links to the website or web page of the company under attack. All the major search engines use inbound links as part of their algorithms for ranking pages so the importance of building them cannot be understated.

These inbound links can come from anywhere on the web but carry the most significance when they come in from high page rank and authority sites. Inbound links also carry value when they come from a website within a relevant industry. Search engines calculate the value of the links as well as the quantity of them to determine how popular a site or page is. The amount of inbound links to your site is important but there are many other mitigating factors that can either devalue links or not consider them at all. For instance links that aren’t relevant to the receiving site aren’t counted by the search engines.

Link building is a critical aspect of reputation management because of the role it plays in getting the pages of the website that is under attack ranked higher than the negative content. This pushes negative content lower in rank and further away from the view of people searching for the business on the internet.

Links can be developed by buying them, creating articles worth linking to, and linking from social networking sites to specific pages on the company website.

As a caveat, while link building is good, the search engines are very aware of the potential abuses so don’t go overboard. A sign of potential abuse in link building are the offers of “thousands of instant links” for a couple of bucks. Don’t buy them as they won’t help but can hurt your website if the search engines catch on.

Due to the labor and time intensiveness of link building, a growing number of companies are employing the services of firms which specialize in online reputation management services. For a free initial consultation on protecting your company’s reputation.