After years of neither supporting nor embracing Online Reputation Management, it looks like Google has finally decided to tell people it’s okay to care about how your appear in Google search results, and they’ve even offered some tips to help. In a recent post to the official Google Blog, Susan Moskwa, a Webmaster Trends Analyst for the company, provided some advice on how to remove content from the web and also how to promote positive content.

ON REMOVING CONTENT

• If the content in question is on a site you own, easy — just remove it. It will naturally drop out of search results after we recrawl the page and discover the change.
• It’s also often easy to remove content from sites you don’t own if you put it there, such as photos you’ve uploaded, or content on your profile page.
• If you can’t remove something yourself, you can contact the site’s webmaster and ask them to remove the content or the page in question.

After you or the site’s webmaster has removed or edited the page, you can expedite the removal of that content from Google using our URL removal tool.

ON PROMOTING CONTENT

• Create a Google profile. When people search for your name, Google can display a link to your Google profile in our search results and people can click through to see whatever information you choose to publish in your profile.
• If a customer writes a negative review of your business, you could ask some of your other customers who are happy with your company to give a fuller picture of your business.
• If a blogger is publishing unflattering photos of you, take some pictures you prefer and publish them in a blog post or two.
• If a newspaper wrote an article about a court case that put you in a negative light, but which was subsequently ruled in your favor, you can ask them to update the article or publish a follow-up article about your exoneration. (This last one may seem far-fetched, but believe it or not, we’ve gotten multiple requests from people in this situation.)

While it’s great to finally have Google officially promoting pro-active Online Reputation Management, I believe that their advice is somewhat oversimplified. Susan is exactly right when she says that people should contact the site’s webmaster before they contact Google if they are attempting to remove negative content. However, contacting a webmaster isn’t always easy. It’s not as if every website on the Internet has a blinking red button that says “Click Here to Complain.”

If a site has been abandoned, it can take hours or days even to track down the person responsible for it. Not everyone has the technical proficiency or time to go jump over all of those hurdles, which is why so many people have turned to us here at Reputation.com. On our MyReputation team, we have a dedicated and experienced group of professionals who know all the ins and outs of removing content from the web.

As to promoting content, Google’s advice is similarly well-intentioned, but weak. If a blogger posts pictures of you, you could combat it by posting your own, but what if the blog in question gets thousands of hits a day and has a very strong page rank. To defeat deeply entrenched content on the web, a person would have to understand the importance of keywords, link strategies, domain registration, and more. For most web surfers, the time and effort required to successfully promote their positive content on the web is too much to handle on their own, which is why we developed MyEdge. Since taking on our first MyEdge customer, we have helped countless men and women from around the globe share their good names online.

We would all be much happier if it were easy to repair and promote reputations online, but that’s not how it works. Perhaps as the web continues to evolve, it will become easier to manage information online, but, until then, if you have a problem with how your name appears online, make sure you have an expert on your side.