An unfortunate truth of life is the more successful and prosperous one becomes, the more likely one is to be attacked.

With the advent and widespread use of the Internet, a forum now exists for one's critics to spout and spew personal venom across a global and anonymous media with little to no consequence.  Bringing an offender to justice has little chance when data can be housed anywhere in the world and thereby ruled by the whims and laws applicable to that region. 

Combine this with the extensive anonymity and breadth of the Internet's landscape and you have a near unconfrontable public relations nightmare.

Taking it upon oneself to track and eliminate online negativity is difficult and often near impossible due to local regulations.  Even when one succeeds in handling a single negative entry, another thousand can pop-up over night and be globally distributed by search engines. 

Adding to this is the fact that legal action often makes the situation worse for the plaintiff when your case becomes a heated topic viewed as oppressing freedom of speech.  This common ploy is used to gain sympathy and promote further negativity, and the sad thing is, it usually works.

While legal action is an important part of one's public relations arsenal, fighting negativity directly does not digitally and thereby globally promote one's true nature and intentions.  A more effective and proactive route does however exist.  The ideal approach to counter online negativity is to out-do it with positive image distribution on a massive scale.

In order to understand why this route is the most effective, you must have a general understanding of how search engines see and thereby rank information. 15 years ago, when there was little data available online, creating a web page that ranked well for a phrase (also known as a keyword) on any search engine was easy. 

However, great misrepresentations of data by certain industries forced search engines to review and modify their systems in order to show relevant results.  These modifications consisted of improving methods used to judge the validity of data. 

Google alone has honed over 200 methods to rank a page; including items such as the longevity of a page, number of keywords and length of content. 

While no search engine is the same, the methods used are similar.

Contact us for a free quote on how to take back control of what is seen when someone searches your name.