A lot has been said about reputation management and social media promotion recently. Jeff did two great posts on pre-emptive reputation management and also on powerful resources that will help you "bury negative posts about you or your company". Today I am adding a few tips on promoting your online profiles and organizing your reputation management campaign.
(image credit: eVisibility)
Create Online Profiles
Below is the table of a few popular services that allow to create a dedicated profile page. They are all general (no niche-specific ones) and I only included services that were designed for creating personal online pages - thus I skipped numerous social bookmarking sites (e.g. Digg, Netscape) and other social networking sites (e.g. Twitter) which can be rather effective for reputation management but are meant for other purposes. Being focused will also allow you to properly set up your profiles and use non-duplicate content for each one.
| Profile URL format | "Dofollow" outbound links | Ranking ability (Google) | Effective promotion | |
| .../people/Your_Name/xxxxxxxxxx | no | moderate | join relevant Facebook fan pages | |
| .../in/name | no | high | externally | |
| Flickr.com | .../people/xxxxxxxx@xxx/ | yes | moderate | comment at relevant popular images |
| Google Pages | http://your.name.googlepages.com/ | yes | high | externally |
| Naymz | .../search/your/name/xxxxxxx | yes | high | externally |
| Yahoo Profiles | .../yourname | yes | low | externally |
| Spock | .../Your-Name-xxxxxxxx | nofollow | moderate | add "friends" |
| ClaimID | .../your-name | yes | high | add "friends" |
| Lookup Page | .../users/yourname/ | yes | low | externally |
| Hub Pages | .../profile/Your+Name | yes | moderate | comment at relevant popular hubs |
| Other Ego | .../profile-your-name.aspx | yes | low | externally |
Profile page ranking ability column reflects my personal experience; it can be different with you.
Effective promotion column shares some tips on the easiest and most effective way to get the page ranked in Google SERPs. "External" refers to the promotion done outside the current site: e.g. links from comments, other profiles and your own sites and blogs.
Manage your profiles:
With the ability to create plenty of online profiles comes the necessity to manage all of them effectively. Here are a few tips on effective managing your online profiles:
- save all your profiles in a separate folder in your (FireFox) bookmarks (and don't forget to drop links to them once you comment at a relevant blog);
- interlink your profiles: link to your other personal pages when creating a new profile - thus you both promote all your profile pages and give more information about yourself;
- use emerging online services that help in managing multiple online profiles.
Point #3 requires a few examples, I guess. So here are a few sites that allow you to "keep all your pages in one page" (some of these services are also great for promoting your other sites and profiles) :
Comwat works for only few popular social media sites and doesn't allow external links;
Rapleaf also works for only a couple of sites and it doesn't allow for a public page.
Simplifid does allow to drop a few "dofollow" links on your personal page but it works for only a couple of social media sites.
Onxiam also lets you add "dofollow" links to your other online profiles but it is unfortunately broken for the majority of links.
ProfileOmat is the best profile-managing service so far: it allows to add unlimited number of links to all your online profiles and all these nice "dofollow" links are kept on your dedicated "landing page" that you can then promote throughout all your resources.
Ann Smarty runs SEO consulting blog and also publishes posts daily at Search Engine Journal.
Post image: Online Reputation Management