Online reputation management or to put it another way, the art of making sure that bad news gets buried and lots of lovely good news rises to the top and masks the bad.

This practise is being used more and more not only by the rich and famous, but by the not so rich and the not so famous.

It is becoming almost commonplace to “Google” potential business associates or partners, therefore if people want to tarnish your reputation for whatever reason, they will most likely get a page ranked in the top Google results page for the search for your name. This could happen without you even knowing.

In these technically minded times, the Internet is always bubbling with information and the sudden popularity of things like facebook and my space means it’s simpler for a ticked off customer, journalist, even lover to damage your reputation should they so wish.

This is where the top SEO companies such as ourselves come in. We can in some cases remove some of the unflattering material (although this is very difficult to do) and then we bombard your name with more suitable content, blogs, websites articles etc and then promote them into the top listings.

What this effectively achieves is that as the SEO magic is worked on the positive content and it moves up the search engine rankings, it will push the unwanted material down to where far fewer people are ever likely to find it.

A search in Google for Kate Moss will show that she has recently had her name cleaned. As in the listings all of the more salacious stories about her are on the second and third pages and the top ten results are filled with only positive listings. In light of her recent news worthiness this would not be the case if the results were ranking completely naturally.

Bad news travels much further and faster than good news, everyone knows that, and Google is no different, so it is essential to have good information about yourself out there, ready for if this ever happens to you, or as a precautionary measure.

Implementing a positive strategy for marketing that maintains a consistant flow of web traffic to your site is by no means impossible. To get this web traffic to your site you need a significant search engine presence, and to achieve this, you need to main things, a quality website that is easy for Google to read and a series of links linking to your site from authority sites all over the web.

This is not as difficult as it sounds as there are many systems in place to make this happen for you. First though, you need to understand that not all links are equal. Google uses a Page Rank system to value each page of each site that it knows about. Ranked from 0 ” 10 with 10 being the best, most popular and valuable sites, and 0 being sites it knows about but thinks very little of. Below 0 is a grey bar graphic in the Google toolbar which indicates that either Google doesnt know that the site exists or worse than that, that the site has been blacklisted by Google and should be avoided.

In a perfect world, we’d all have lots of links from the home-pages PR-10 sites, however the fact that there are only around 10 PR-10 sites that exist somewhat hinders this approach, and those 10 or so won’t usually link to many other websites because they don’t need to, have nothing to gain from it, and would never stop receiving link requests. Even slightly lower PR sites, like PR-7/8s are very picky about who they link to. These highly ranked sites are known as “authority” sites and tend not to link to lower ranked sites (not very often anyway) because they simply have nothing to gain from it.

Your mission is to get as many sites with some PR or the potential to soon get some PR to link to you as possible. This means in effect that getting a link from a newish site that hasnt been live long, has no PR but is working on link building is a good strategy to adopt in the longer term. Google only allocated PR twice per year, so if you are unlucky you might need to wait months in order to gain some PR. The amount you are given will depend upon the link juice you squeeze from all the sites that link to you. The more, high pr sites you receive a link from, the higher your PR will ultimately be.

So how does one go about getting these links together? Well, that is just the question. You can hunt down sites online that seem to link to other sites. There are quite a few sites about that provide reciprocal linking. The flaw with these is that reciprocal links aren’t really worth a great deal any more (although they are woth something as sometimes two-way links are natural eg.customer & supplier etc.they’re just not worth much). This is because the major search engines have cottoned on to the arrangement being made between sites with this type of link, they have therefore begun to downgrade their worth.

By far the most efficient way to get to the good seats in the search engine results ranking (at the top) is with one way links (getting sites to link to you without you having to link back). As people aren’t very inclined to give away links for nothing, this can be quite difficult. Some sites may just genuinely like your site’s content and give link to you as a resource for their users, but generally speaking, you will have to give them return

You may have problems achieving these one way links if you only have one website. There are a few answers to this issue, but one way link management is the clear way to go.

Effectively, your site is entered into a triangular arrangment where your site (site A) links to site B, which then links to site C, which then links back to site A (your site) this is beneficial to each site to the value of one one-way link. The big search engines cannot trace these links and so they reward you with a big push up the results rankings.