Need help managing your Google reputation? Andy Beal offers Google reputation management consulting or buy his new online reputation management book.

Google is no longer just a search engine. With your potential customers, future employers, and members of the media turning to Google for information about your business, Google has become a reputation engine.

In helping clients with their online reputation, I’m consistently asked how they can push out negative results that appears on the first page of Google for a search for their name. Whether they were fined by the SEC, ridiculed by an ex-employee, or investigated by their local newspaper, they share one common goal: get that negative result off of the first page!

Of course, it’s near on impossible to make a negative Google result simply disappear—although there are some black-hat SEOs that claim to have that gift. Instead, your best approach is to provide Googlebot with a healthier diet of web content that shows your reputation in a positive light.

On that note, here are my recommendations for the best web content to fill up the first page of Google results.

1. Get your own web site.

It sounds simply enough, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, you’d be surprised at the number of individuals and companies that haven’t registered their own branded domain name and thrown up a web site. Registering yourcompanyname.com or yourpersonalname.com and adding a basic web site is a sure-fire way to occupy one of the top ten Google listings for your name.

2. Start a blog.

If you love and nurture a blog, it will likely become a great asset in your reputation management arsenal. But the great thing about a blog is that it tends to rank well, even when left un-watered. Blogs are the cactus of online content. Wordpress.com and Blogger.com both provide free blogs and free hosting. Add just a few posts, keep it targeted to your name—that means use it in the blog title, posts etc—add a few links and bake for a few days. It will be on the first page of Google in no time.

3. Add a sub-domain.

If you’ve put a lot of effort into growing your main web site, chances are there’s an opportunity to add a sub-domain. Sub-domains are great. Google considers them as separate from your main site, but they still include your main brand. There are a lot of great reasons to add a sub-domain: careers, corporate info, and product info. Take a look at jobs.marketingpilgrim.com as an example.

4. Create a social networking profile.

profiles can rank well for your personal or company name. When you sign-up, be sure to use your real name—using a nickname won’t help with your Google reputation—and enable the option that lets you pick the URL of your profile. myspace.com/companyname works a whole lot better than myspace.com/12345678.

5. Create your own social network.

If a social networking profile ranks well in Google, how much more so your own social network? Ning.com will let you create your own customized social network. Better yet, you can pay just $5 a month and point your own domain name at it. Take a look at www.marketingpilgrim.tv for an example.

6. Create a business profile.

because it’s a great tool for networking with your peers. You should also join LinkedIn as it allows you to talk about yourself, link to your other Google-friendly web content, and customize your profile URL. Wouldn’t you rather your potential employer find your LinkedIn profile on Google, than that run-in you had with your last boss?

7. Share your photos.

Flickr.com is very Google friendly. Upload photos of you, your company logo, your products, etc, and label them using your name. Add some comments to each photo (including your name) and Voila! You’ve just added a dozen pages of content, each labeled with your company name! Be sure to do the same when selecting your profile name for Flickr too.

8. Claim your identity.

Naymz.com is a blessing for those looking to control their Google reputation. It effectively lets you create a profile and then link out to all of your other profiles. Whereas LinkedIn is heavy on the networking-side, Naymz is more of a holding-tank for your brand. Best of all, Google seems to love it!

9. Create your own Wiki.

If you’re facing a Google reputation nightmare, you may be tempted to create a Wikipedia profile for yourself. After all, Wikipedia ranks all over Google, right? Bad move. Not only is it hard to get one approved, but they’re totally unbiased. That DUI incident, you’re trying to cover-up, will likely make its way on to your profile. Not good. Instead create your own wiki and build your profile that way. Wetpaint.com is perfect for this. You can focus it on your personal name, or your company name. The best part is that you get to decide who contributes to it.

10. Get a free page from Google.

I’ve saved the best until last. Ok, I lied. While a free page from Google Page Creator (googlepages.com) isn’t the best web content for managing your Google reputation, there’s something satisfying about having Google help mend your reputation.

So, there you have it. While these shouldn’t be used as a “get out of jail free card”—you should avoid a reputation nightmare to begin with—they’ll at least help you re-build your Google reputation.

(This article was first published by Andy on Gooruze.
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source : marketing pilgrim

Case study : Broadband Wireless Exchange : www.bbwexchange.com

Business
Robert Hoskins is what you might call a subject-matter expert, and the subject is the fast-growing world of broadband wireless. His extensive meta-site, Broadband Wireless Exchange (BWE), www.bbwexchange.com, comprises 12 individual sites targeting specific areas including the various 802.11 standards, free space optics, and the valuable slices of broadband wireless spectrum. Each site provides industry news, stories, analyst reports, and product directories. Appealing to a growing audience of technical and business readers, Hoskins, who is Editor and Group Publisher, is getting 30,000 to 50,000 page views each day.

Approach
"At BWE, our mission is to help readers find information on the products and services they want to buy," says Hoskins. "Accordingly, our goal is to provide the most targeted advertising possible for our readers, and at the same time have it produce additional ad revenue for us." That's one reason he was pleased to discover that Google offers AdSense, a service that enables web publishers to display Google AdWords™ ads on their content pages.
"We have tens of thousand of pages that can now serve up advertisements directly related to the content our readers are researching."

Before Hoskins used the Google AdSense™ service, BWE was already serving ads, which the company's vice president of sales sold directly to vendors. But like many web publishers, Hoskins still had a lot of unsold inventory. Finding advertisers with ads that fit the specialized content of his site was not an easy task. Google AdSense seemed like the perfect solution.

Hoskins opted to use Google AdSense to run AdWords ads on pages of all 12 sites under the BWE umbrella. As an entrepreneur, he switched hats from executive to programmer, and implemented his own ad code to the site. "It was incredibly easy," he says, "and took very little time to copy and paste the HTML in the right places."

Results
"What we got from Google," Hoskins says, "was a much more sophisticated system that allowed us to effectively target readers who were researching specific equipment categories with advertisements, from companies that actually sold that type of networking equipment. So someone who was reading about 802.11 antennas would only see ads for vendors who sold 802.11 antennas."
"These ads run in places that would have gone unsold - and we get revenue we would not have otherwise."

As with any web publisher in a specialized market, this approach suits Hoskins' business model very well. In running a Google AdSense skyscraper (a vertical format that features up to four ads), Hoskins reports he's seeing an additional $3,000 a month in revenue. "These ads run in places that would have gone unsold – and we get revenue we would not have otherwise," he says. "Google has dramatically improved our ability to provide readers with extremely targeted ads. We have tens of thousand of pages that can now serve up advertisements directly related to the content our readers are researching."

For Hoskins, there's a second important benefit: Google advertising effectively doubles BWE's sales efforts. "Instead of spending money to hire an additional sales rep to sell ad banners to the correct target audience," he says, "Google ads have become a virtual sales tool for us, and it doesn't cost BWE a cent. Now we're able to reap thousands of dollars in additional advertising revenue each month that we would very likely have missed without Google AdWords."

In short, Hoskins says, AdSense is a "win-win relationship. BWE gets additional advertising revenue with little or no effort, and BWE readers see ads that interest them. And that enables our team at BWE to focus on our core business."

source : Adsense Story