These days you can bet your bottom dollar that most business transactions are preceeded by some sort of a search on one of the major search engines for your company name. If those results don’t show your company in a positive light, then you are likely losing business.

It could be someone ranting on a forum about your company, or maybe it’s those embarrassing photos of you from your ‘less professional’ days. After a job interview, after pitching for business or after finally plucking up the courage to ask the girl of your dreams out you had better hope they don’t check up on you in the search engines.

The following links should provide all the information you need to help you to find out if this is happening and clean up your online presence. Not only that but by following the tips given in the various excellent reputation monitoring guides you should be able to protect you or your company from any reputation management issues going forward.

Cautionary Tales

Apple’s Reputation Sours [Marketing Pilgrim]

Another ‘ignore bloggers, this is what you get’ cautionary tale for companies [The Viral Garden]

Web damage control has become a big business [Seattle Times]

Good or Bad, Words Spreads Fast on the Web [Search Engine Guide]

BloggingDosh - How To Destroy Your Reputation [John Chow]

How NOT to Handle an Online Reputation Management Crisis [Copy Brighter]

Absolute Poker Have A Reputation Management Crisis [Distilled]

Reputation Management

Free Online Reputation Management Beginner’s Guide [Marketing Pilgrim]

A Best Practice Primer to Search Engine Reputation Management [Brandcurve]

Reputation Management - The Top Ten Tips to Clean Up Your Online Reputation [Manage your Buzz]

The Ethics of Reputation Management (or, “Getting Stuff Deleted From Google”) [SEOmoz]

Chris Bennett on Reputation Management (E-Tourism Summit) [97th Floor]

4 Lessons in Online Reputation Management from a Small Town Grocer [Search Engine Guide]

Ten Ways to Avoid a Google Reputation Management Nightmare [Marketing Pilgrim]

The Definitive Guide to Online Reputation Management [Scoreboard Media]

Common Reputation Management Issues and How To Address Them [invesp]

6 Easy Steps to Personal Reputation Management [Reputation advisor]

Reputation Management Anyone Can Do [97th Floor]

Using social media sites for reputation management [Pronet Advertising]

New Survey Proves You Must Manage Your Own Online Reputation [Bill Hartzer]

Get Rid of Rip Off Report in 6 Weeks [97th Floor] - Warning - this is a sales page(!) but there are some good tips

Protecting Your Online Reputation [Pronet Advertising]

Online Reputation Management Tips - Reputation Advisor [Reputation Advisor]

Crowdsourcing :: Reputation Management for Digital Natives [Young PR]

Dos and don’ts for digi natives [PR Blogger]

Not Just Your Space - The College Student’s Guide to Managing Online Reputation [Naymz]

Online Reputation Management, Are You Doing It? [Search Engine Guide]

Basics of Online Reputation Management [Top Rank Blog]

Tips on Safeguarding Your Online Reputation [The Wall Street Journal]

Five Ways Negative Reviews Help Your Online Reputation

Reputation Monitoring

17 Search Engine Reputation Management Optimization Tips [Mediapost]

Why Blog Monitoring is Useless Without Community Context (or Another Analogy) [Hyku]

31 Places to Monitor Your Reputation Online [Search Marketing Gurus]

7 Free Brand Reputation Management Tips [Thirstypony]

23 things every company should be monitoring… [Jaffejuice]

10 things you should be monitoring [Pronet Advertising]

10 things you should be monitoring (and a few more from me) [Web Strategist]

How to use analytics software for reputation monitoring [Distilled]

Using the Search Engines

Tips for Controlling the Top 10 [Wolf Howl]

Using Social Media To Help Manage Online Reputation [Search Rank]

Own Your Google Reputation with these Ten Suggestions [Gooruze]

Using Search for Public Relations & Reputation Management [Search Engine Watch]

Using blogs / bloggers

How to Write a Social Media Press Release [Copyblogger]

Build Your Online Reputation with Consistent Posting [A list seo]

Blogger Relations 101 [Top Rank]

Blogs: Making Your Pitch - What Not To Do [Search Marketing Gurus]

How NOT to pitch a blog [Top Rank]

10 Ways to Hurt Your Blog’s Brand by Commenting on Other Blogs [Problogger]

Aggressive Reputation Management

Aggressive Reputation Management [Distilled]

Making Link Bait and Viral Marketing Work - Part Ten [Search Engine Guide] - How to capitalise on your competitor’s failures

Everything You Need to Know About FRO (Fake Review Optimization) [Tropical seo]

Don’t Just Manage Your Reputation, Respond to Your Competitor’s [Search Engine Guide]

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