Dealing With An Attack On Your Reputation? Reputation Resolutions Explains What You Should Do.


Sarah Wright | Updated: 07-12-2022 12:56 IST | Created: 07-12-2022 11:16 IST
Dealing With An Attack On Your Reputation? Reputation Resolutions Explains What You Should Do.
Image Credit: Pixabay

The internet is great for many things, but it can also be a dark place filled with negative, false, and defamatory attacks online. Being on the receiving end of an online attack can be one of the most distressing issues a person or company will face in the digital age.

Negative content can surface regardless of how carefully you protect your company or personal reputation. In a world where anonymity prevails and anyone with an internet connection has easy access to publish content, attacking a company's or individual's reputation can be a favorite strategy for adversaries.

Anthony Will, the CEO, and the co-founder of Reputation Resolutions, one of the top reputation management firms in the United States, says the major issue with negative content on Google is that it often pops up at the top of results when someone Googles a business or individual's name. Unless you act quickly and decisively, negative online content can tarnish your reputation and derail a business deal before you can set the record straight.

While this negative content may be false and misleading, it can come to represent the entirety of who an individual or business is in the "court of public opinion." That can cause massive problems with people searching for jobs or companies looking to gain and retain customers.

That's why people and businesses being attacked online must get on top of the issue right away versus waiting to try to fix the problem and hoping it goes away.

"One of the worst mistakes and common misconceptions people make is that when negative content is published, they take a wait-and-see approach and hope it will naturally go away with time," Anthony Will said. "It's the exact opposite. The longer the negative content is out there, the more difficult it will be to remove or suppress. So, starting any initiative to fix negative search results as soon as possible is incredibly important to your overall success and ability to fix the problem expeditiously."

One of the biggest challenges is that most individuals and business leaders don't have the time, resources, or knowledge to do this on their own. Before Reputation Resolutions was founded, there weren't many great options for firms to hire to help in this regard, either.

That's one of the main reasons Anthony Will started the company along with co-founder Stephen Van Delinder. The pair started Reputation Resolutions in 2013 after leaving the consulting firm where they were both working. They grew the company from a small firm into one of the premier online reputation management firms in the United States.

Anthony Will explains that whether someone is dealing with negative written content, video content, or images, the first course of action should always be to see if you can remove the negative content completely. That can be done, he explained, in several different ways, including analyzing a site's terms of service.

"We are one of the few companies globally that offer guaranteed content removal services with no upfront payment to get started," explained Anthony Will, the co-founder, and CEO of Reputation Resolutions. "If we think there's a realistic chance that we can remove negative content harmful to a person or brand's reputation, we offer that service on a contingency basis. Payments are only due after successful completion and removal of the negative content."

If the complete removal can't be done, though, the next best thing is to suppress the negative content. After all, it's often not the existence of the content that's the problem; it's the fact that it appears high in search results. If the content could be pushed far down the search results list, it could solve the problem for many individuals and businesses.

Anthony Will, CEO of Reputation Resolutions, explains why negative content can outpace all the good that your company does. He said, "When people call our company, a common question is, why is a negative article or negative content ranking so highly in Google Search results? Often, we see people calling us that have a lot of social properties or a lot of positive content already out there, but the negative content, whatever it may be, has quickly ranked above that. The question always is, why is that happening?

"In its simplest form, the best way to explain why this is happening is to take a high-level look at Google's algorithm and how it operates. In Google's algorithm, there are over 200 ranking factors as to why a specific link will rank in search results for any given keyword. Out of those 200 ranking factors, the most critical that you need to consider are domain authority and engagement metrics. Every site on the internet has a domain authority. Think of domain authority as almost like a website's trust or power factor. Domain authority is on a scale of zero to 100. The higher the domain authority, the higher the site will rank.

"If you think about the most popular and credible sites in the world like Forbes, Facebook, and all the social sites, they all have very high domain authority. So, if you have negative content on a high domain authority site and your name is listed, or your company's name is listed within that domain, it typically, by default, will rank very high, very quickly."

It's not just who said what about you or your company, but where they said it. If they post it on a high domain authority site, it will outrank other content about your business. Online attacks will unfortunately always be present in the digital world, but there will always be companies like Reputation Resolutions creating and implementing solutions to these issues.

(Disclaimer: Devdiscourse's journalists were not involved in the production of this article. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Devdiscourse and Devdiscourse does not claim any responsibility for the same.)

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