Little known ways to remove ripoff reports

Social Media is often recognized as “one giant conversation”. As such, if during the social conversation your name gets slandered…you need to start circulating positive information. The best method to accomplish this  is to start a conversation of your own.  Create profiles on a variety of social media sites (preferably sites you can leverage for traffic and indexable profiles – linked-In, Digg, squidoo), populate them with content that depicts you or your company in a very positive light, and be as active as possible. If you don’t have the time to handle that…hire a social media consultant to do it for you.

Remember, the best way to silence one voice is to drown it out with thousands of stronger and louder voices. Ripoff reports never really go away.  You CAN’T manually remove them yourself…but you can push them back so far into the SERPs, they become invisible to most people looking for information on you or your brand.

2. Control your name in the SERPs

There are a variety of methods to own your name online, but we’ve found three techniques which can rapidly increase your chances of success in removing a ripoff report form the SERPs.

First, make sure you own your name or company in domain form.  We’re talking .com, .org, .net, .biz, .info and .edu if possible. Make sure you lock down your name as well as several variations of your name. From there, it’s just a matter of developing corresponding title tags, filling the sites with information about you or your company, and making sure you build a few links with your name as the anchor text.  Do whatever it takes.  Within a few weeks, you’ll start to see those results populate around the domain affected by the RipOff Report.

Second, as reccomended by Andy Beal, locate and get involved in forums which are relevant to your business niche.  These are places where people are actively discussing issues relating to your industry. Get involved…save face.  Be as genuine and forthcoming as possible. Honesty is the best policy when it comes to interacting with people online.  Try to pull one over on a group…be prepared to suffer the consequences.

Third, get involved in the blog community relative to your niche.  A review, endorsement, recommendation, or shout out from a respected blogger can help to improve your overall reputation online and also helps with earning additional results in SERPs affected by the ripoff report.  Whether you get involved with pay-per-post, social spark, or you take the initiative to reach out to bloggers on your own accord (with a unique value proposition to offer of course) – you need to do something to get a positive conversation started.