• Search Engine People, Tuesday, June 24, 2008 2:45 PM

While most companies have developed a search-based damage control strategy in the event of bad publicity or a major customer service snafu, Jeff Quipp suggests that doing some preemptive reputation management (PRM) could actually save time (and face) when something does go wrong.

It starts with identifying the term or terms that pose the greatest risk to the company. Build up as many powerful pages as possible to rank for those terms, and then maintain and strengthen those pages continually over time.

With proper PRM, Quipp says that at least 90% of the negative stories about a company can be prevented from appearing in the first page of search results for a given term. The other 10% of the time, the negative info appears below the fold--and gets pushed back down to the latter pages much faster than if there had been no PRM work.

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