Archives May 2017

Ripoff Report is a website setup to field anonymous complaints about a business or service, but some users post things that are untrue or damaging to your reputation. If you’re concerned about your online reputation management, read on for advice on how to remove Ripoff Report posts and salvage your presence in Google.

Social Media

If you’re worried about your appearance in search, than practicing good social media will help. Owning YouTube, Twitter and Facebook URLs from your brand will take up some of the space on page one of Google, making sure that negative content is pushed lower.

Request Removal

Ripoff Report does not typically respond to removal requests, and US laws protect them from anonymous content. However, a default judgment can help you.

DMCA

If any of the content posted belongs to you, for example the user used a picture from your website, then you can ask for removal of that copyrighted content. You’ll need to file a DMCA with the site, and with Google, but the content should vanish if you can claim you own it.

Court Ordered Removals

You can get a default judgment if you sue John Doe. This only works if the posting is anonymous. Essentially, the judge rules in your favor because the defendant doesn’t show up to prove his or her side. With that judgment, you can get websites to remove your content.

Consult a reputation Management Firm

Reputation management is a good route to pursue when you can’t find other solutions. The tips listed above may work for some of you. If the posts return, you may also need a good firm to manage these repeated incidents and reclaim your status in search.

Proactive reputation management is an excellent strategy for any scaling brand concerned about its image online. Being proactive means you stay on top of alerts to your brand, that you remain agile and can respond to customer concerns, and that you’re in touch with your brand’s appearance online. Here are some tips to help you create a system for yourself.

Domain Real Estate

The first thing you can do is to buy up all domain real estate for your brand within reason. You should buy all the common extensions of your brand name, including .com, .net, and .org, and you may want to try some variations on that name too. If you’re a bigger brand, buying your brand name with the word “sucks” attached to it is a good way to secure yourself from negative press before it happens.

Social Profiles

Another great way to expand your presence in search is to secure any social profiles around the Web. Start with the major names, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, then branch out to the lesser known but still heavily trafficked properties (like Tumblr or Pinterest). This way, if you start to see a lot of activity on any platform you can quickly join the conversation.

Start Pitching Content

The final component to consider is to start promoting yourself by putting more of your work on various blogs. If you can get more guest articles published, you’ll start drawing in readers from outside your blog seeking your expertise. In addition, you also build links to your various profiles. These signals tell Google to identify your sites with your name, thereby improving your standing and reputation in search.

According to the Harvard Business Review, negative Yelp reviews can severely hurt the bottom line of your business. Restaurant’s seem to be among the most susceptible to the reputation management problems that come with poor reviews. Here are some of the ways that a negative Yelp review can affect your business for the worst.

Fewer Patrons

Negative Yelp reviews mean that fewer people will want to visit a given business, and many will be turned off immediately. Yelp reviews do carry some influence on social media, and users will be able to see the star rating immediately on the site itself. In addition, Google snippets may include information about a restaurant’s reviews, which are visible when a user searches for your brand.

In short, negative reviews cause a lot of image problems. Users will see these reviews and some will conclude your business isn’t up to their standards.

Less Revenue

Fewer patrons means less revenue. Negative Yelp reviews are a lot like leaving money on the table. You should do your best to try and read these reviews for critical feedback. If you change your customer service, users may leave positive reviews or take down their negative reviews.

Final Thoughts

Make sure you carefully read the terms of service for Yelp. They do not allow business owners to provide incentives for better reviews, and your site can be cited if you attempt to buy reviews online.

If someone has said something about you that is untrue, and damaging to your reputation, it can feel like you have no recourse for making things right. If you try and petition site owners that allow this kind of content, they may not respond to you. Here are some options for online reputation management if you’re ever in this situation.

Social Media

Practicing good SEO and social media allows you to push unfavorable results out of the top search pages. This helps improve your reputation when someone searches for content about you.

Request Removal

This strategy doesn’t always work because of US laws protecting site owners, but it’s always a good idea to try.

DMCA

If you own any of the text, or the images or video, that have been posted then a DMCA is a solid strategy. You simply claim ownership over the copyrighted material, and the site owner typically has little recourse to fight you.

Find Out Removal Guidelines

Yelp allows original posters to remove their reviews. Find out if you can talk with those users, and what you can offer them to try and get them to remove the negative review.

Court Ordered Removals

If the poster is anonymous, you can sue John Doe to get a default judgment. If this works, you have a court order you can present to the website in order to try and get removal from hosting companies and search engines.

Consult a Reputation Management Firm

Reputation management is a good last resort if you can’t solve the problem on your own. A variety of fixes are available, so you should definitely try and see what you can do before you consult a professional. However, understand that consulting a professional may come with guarantees of removal that can be valuable too.

Google released its “autocomplete” feature in 2004, and it was designed to streamline search. One only needed to enter the first few letters of a query, and Google would seem to magically find exactly the term you wanted. Today, the feature can seem somewhat invasive and creepy, but it’s a handy feature many users can’t seem to live without.

Google’s feature works based on the popularity of particular terms. It knows that a Google searching for “wea” probably wants weather, and more than likely wants the forecasts for today. It will return those queries logically, but it also tries to do some anticipating and that’s where things get borderline offensive.

Suggestions are based on real queries that people make, so Google is only basing it off of data it has seen in the wild. This has led to some very interesting, and troubling searches for research purposes. The most famous of those was documented in a Guardian article, where Google’s predictive search led the writer to a query regarding holocaust denial.

Google’s solution to this problem is to utilize a system of feedback, where users can report potentially offensive searches. Those queries won’t immediately vanish, but the user will be able to contribute to better policing of the system. It’s not really clear how this will help long term, but it will most likely impact Google’s algorithm by giving them more data about what users find offensive.

It’s also not clear whether it’s possible to game this system, and report terms that aren’t actually offensive but that users want to block. What if a politician spoke out against a particular group, for instance, and that group banded together to label searches for this person’s name offensive? Perhaps there is still a long way to go, but Google’s off to an interesting start in helping users police themselves.

Summary: A visual representation of what your business offers can give you that much-needed boost that you’ve been lacking.

Contrary to popular belief, reputation management isn’t just about social media monitoring. As a matter of fact, it involves other key aspects such as creating videos/slideshows to promote your business. This guide will discuss how you can go about doing this process without spending thousands of dollars that most mainstream studios demand.

Get a Video Made for $5

Yes, you read correctly. You can have your very own custom video made from the talented community at Fiverr for $5 and up. If you haven’t heard of Fiverr before, it’s essentially a marketplace of freelancers that offers a variety of tasks and services. Simply find a freelancer that has a majority of positive reviews, or one that specifically stands out to you, and reach out to the individual to see if he or her can accommodate your needs. Be sure to include as much detail as you can about your project so you don’t end up having to send it back for revisions.

Fiverr also provides services that allow you to get a head start, so to speak, when it comes to view counts and comments. A video that has little to no views obviously won’t have any impact on your business. However, if the online community sees a significant view count, they might just be intrigued to see what’s so special about your video.

Post Your Video on Popular Video Sharing Sites

Once you get your video back, you’ll need the appropriate exposure. This can easily be done by uploading your video on popular sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo. Remember, if your video stands out, it has the potential of obtaining virility status – meaning hundreds of thousands of people has seen your video and it’s essentially spreading like a wildfire amongst the community.

Be sure to place the relevant keywords in your video title to optimize it as well. For instance, if your video showcases the culinary industry, you’ll want to include specific words that people often search for. Nobody wants to click on a video that has a dull and uninteresting title. Furthermore doing this can help you create an online presence and even improve your company’s status in popular search engines like Google or Bing.

Summary: The former battleground for online bashing is now a celebrity gossip site.

TheDirty.com, was formerly known for allowing users to post nearly anything that they’d like, anonymously and without any remorse. The site became a hunting ground for whomever, whether it was due to jealousy, anger, or just to purposely ruin one’s life. Most of the time, the damage comes from a compromising photo or a text message. Furthermore, it also allowed people to post personal information if they pleased.

A New Chapter

Nik Richie, the owner of The Dirty, claimed to have realized that his site was not only destroying the lives of others, but also took part in becoming a breeding ground for hatred and defamation. After listening to Melania Trump’s speech regarding cyberbullying, Richie pledged to alter his ways and revamp the site to primarily posting the latest gossip on celebrities, similar to TMZ.

According to Richie, he went on to say, “ I asked myself as a father am I doing what’s right for my family or this country. I looked in the mirror and had my wake up call. Am I part of the problem or solution? I am the problem. My website was built on humor but it guided down a path of hate. That’s not me or how I want my legacy to end.”

The End? Or the Beginning?

For those that have been harassed, insulted, and slandered, retribution has finally come. However, for many, it’s already too late. The harsh realities of previous posts still haunt the public to this very day – and can even be found deep within the archives. It remains to be seen how well this new “fiber of mainstream media” will fare with the public, but it goes without saying this could have a significant impact on the future of cyberbullying with this drastic change.

Summary: A nasty mug shot posted online can have detrimental effects on one’s personal life. Fortunately, there are ways to minimize the harm done.

Mitigating the damage stemming from a public mug shot is possible and can be done by implementing a variety of tactics. This guide is designed to showcase what steps you can take to bury these negative image results that pop up in the popular search engines.

Take Advantage of the DMCA

The DMCA, or Digital Millenium Copyright Act, can potentially help remove these unwarranted photos from domains that unlawfully obtained them. By filing a DMCA takedown notice and consulting with a DMCA agent, there is a possibility that these images can be taken down.

Push the Negative Image Down

While it’s extremely difficult to get a photo removed from a popular search engine like Google, the next best thing you can do is to simply bury them. One way you can go about doing this is to sign up for social media profiles. Since Google tends to continuously crawl the web for social media sites, your photo could get out there. By uploading multiple photos of yourself that are related to your name, you could essentially push the negative images to the depths of the search results – and most people aren’t persistent enough to go page after page to find an image or two unless you’re a celebrity or mainstream figure.

Let a Reputation Management Firm Help You

If the entire ordeal seems too much for you to handle, there are a variety of reputation management services, like Reputation Stars, that incorporate a combination of social media profiles and search engine optimization to, as mentioned before, bury your negative images deep into the results. While your image may never permanently deleted from the database, the goal of reputation management is to divert the crowd away from the images and instead focus on the positive life – therefore retaining the dignity that you believed to have lost when the picture was posted.

In the world of reputation management, Yelp is like a frequent offender. The site can seemingly hold a business hostage with negative reviews, but the good news is those reviews can be removed. Even better: you won’t need to pay Yelp a dime if you use these tips to help police your Yelp page.

Ask the Customer to Remove It

By far, the simplest method is to request that the customer just remove his review. Online reputation management companies almost always recommend this route first. Show some empathy, and directly address their concern. You can contact them through Yelp, or through any other means you might have to find them. Just make sure that you take the time you need to calm down. A negative review can make some feel heated, but that passion can only hurt your outreach efforts.

Look for TOS Violations

Another lesser known secret is to find reviews that don’t conform to Yelp’s terms of service. If the review was written on behalf of someone, or if the review reads like a personal attack, it can be struck down.

Last Resort: Respond

You can always respond to the review and try to address the concerns. As long as you’re fair and empathetic, this can be a good thing for your business. If the customer is stubborn, but you’ve attempted to fix the problem, then you no longer look like the bad guy in that situation. Although your stars still take a hit, others can jump in and offer positive reviews to improve your online reputation management.

Summary: Nude images plague today’s Internet space. The problem is, most of the images are posted without consent.

If you’re one of the many victims of what’s known as revenge porn, not all hope is lost. For years, people have dealt with the emotional stress of having their nude photos leaked across the Internet. Worst of all, there was simply nothing they could do about it. Don’t fret, this guide is designed to help minimize the damages that your ex has caused.

Make Contact With the Website Owner

If you know the specific domain that your pictures were leaked to, be sure and try to make contact with the owner of the site. But, let’s be realistic, these individuals are in it for the views and the clicks. They could care less about your privacy and the emotional impact that it’s caused to you. Still, it never hurts to try. Be upfront and firm, but also be sure that you maintain a high degree of self esteem as well.

Work To Get it Removed from Search Engines

If you haven’t done so already, file a DMCA takedown notice to the offending website or to the Internet Service Provider. DMCA is short for Digital Millenium Copyright Act and is comprised of a group of laws that protect against copyrighted content on a digital medium. If your picture is stolen and placed on the website without your consent, there is a chance that you can get it removed from the search engines by contacting a DMCA agent and providing the specifics of your case. Note that you need to follow the instruction of the agent and provide them with all the necessary details that he or she requires.

Look to Hire a Reputation Management Firm

Reputation management firms, like Reputation Stars, work to minimize the visibility of the images. By using tactics like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media, these companies take control of the situation by making it much more difficult to locate the nude images. If the photos can’t be found, fewer people will even notice it exists, giving victims back their dignity and self-esteem.