If you are looking to repair or protect your reputation you need to act carefully.
When you want to hide anything negative in search results you are stepping in to the arena.
Rule 1 of Repairing Your Reputation!
Be careful what you post online. Be so careful. If you are faced with a negative review or something bad is written about you, you might want to vent your anger and reply to the complaint. You can do more damage to your reputation by responding, so walk away from the computer and think.
Never reply in anger. We have seen things that would make you cringe. Your move is to remove the negative, or to hide it. In most cases you can not delete or properly remove negative search results, so your most effective way to repair your reputation is to control the search results instead.
Rule 2…
Be careful what you post online. When you are attempting to repair your reputation by developing positive assets, you must choose the right channels with the right message. So many angry business owners go and post fake positive reviews to try and hide the negative. This is a whole can of worms. You might think that you are helping, but this can be the nail in the coffin.
You are not the first person that has thought about posting a fake positive review. Trust us, this ends in tears. If people are posting negative things about you or your business in review websites and forums, it looks so dumb when a new 5 star review suddenly appears. And in many cases the moderators of these sites will mark it as spam.
Think about it… You get some bad reviews and then post a glowing 5 star review. You have to set up a new account with the review website and you have not written a review before. You have no history and no profile image. This is a red flag to a review website. In many cases their spam filter will catch it… If you do it a few times you will get a warning, and if they think you are up to something they can post a warning on the page itself. In this case you have spent time adding to the website, building it up by posting comments and giving it attention, and then it ranks in the top positions of a search for your business. Now people see a warning that you have tried to mess with the rankings, and you still have negative reviews. This destroys your credibility and will be a much harder profile to hide and suppress in online search results.
