Google, the 1st Amendment, and Your Online Reputation

Some of us from time to time come face-to-face with the dark side of the Internet. You work tirelessly for years to build a strong reputation for quality products and services to find overnight that Google has associated your name or your company's name to unflattering content. Click Here to see how some companies are fighting back. This link takes you to positive content that has been developed for a client company, content that is purposely designed to influence the search engines' thematic formula.

Negative content can develop on the Internet in a variety of ways, some innocent, and others quite malicious, but none of it good. Unfortunately when Google forms a bitter triangle with negative content and the free speech rights granted by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution, bad things can happen to a company's or an individual's reputation on the Internet. The fact is that Google loves textual content and also loves the challenge of parsing it to determine the theme and importance of the words on the page. However, sometimes Google finds negative content associated with an entity, and sometimes Google just gets things wrong and associates the wrong content with the wrong company. Here are some examples of how negative content can be published and associated with you or your company:

1. Google's robotic suggestion tool matches words that appear on a page regardless of their relationship to each other;

2. A bipolar blogger loses his prescription and decides that you or your company is a good target for vile behavior called content bashing;

3. A disgruntled ex-employee decides to trash your company in his or her newly-found free time.

4. A customer with a non-performance claim, legitimate or completely baseless, files the claim on one of many complaint boards that have sprung up to fill the need.

The list of potential problems goes on and on, but unless the content that has been published is patently untrue, free speech rights allow anyone to express any opinion about others. And even if the content is accurate, the entity that published it may not be worth the cost of a law suit. Furthermore, we have even seen legal advice that even when content is blatantly libelous, it is not considered defamation because no one would believe it!

So our advice is to be pro-active with your reputation management needs and get ahead of any potential problems by publishing true and positive information about yourself and your firm on as many authoritative sites as possible before the adverse event. By authoritative, we mean sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Naymz, Youtube, Twitter and many more like them; these are sites that are trusted and frequently indexed by the major search engines.

SOHO can help with the proactive activities as well as help repair damage that may exist or occur in the future. You may contact us here: www.sohoprospecting.com.

The SOHO Team