Last year, a prominent DN Forum member had his name registered as a .com domain by a domainer who, for reasons unknown to me, decided he wanted to once again cause a problem on DN Forum. Shortly after hearing about this, I decided that it was well worth spending $8 to secure my name in .com. I list my full name on forums I participate in, so it’s not uncommon for a few people each month to search my name on Google for example. Knowing how well exact match domains index in Google, I’d sure hate for the first result to be something along the lines of “Don’t sell anything to Reece. He’s a racist scammer who will reverse payment and then blog about it!”

For someone who doesn’t know me or doesn’t know me very well, something as simple as that might be enough to make them hesitant or even unwilling to do business with me. I do a thorough investigation (which does include Googling the person’s name) into a person’s background before doing large transactions with people I don’t know or whose credibility I cannot ascertain — seeing something along the lines of what I’ve italicized above wouldn’t break a deal but would certainly encourage me to do more digging before agreeing to anything.

There’s no guarantee that someone out there isn’t already planning on trying to destroy your reputation. It could have been as simple as an argument on a forum or an unhappy customer – there might not seem to be anything you did to deserve this (eg. if you’re involved in politics). It doesn’t really matter what the reason is, what matters is the damage that could be done. Most of us ordinary folk aren’t going to have to worry about a substantial amount of type-in traffic flowing to the .com, so settling for the .net, .info, etc likely wouldn’t be a problem. In the near future, I plan on creating a small minisite for my name just to get something indexed in Google before anything negative starts getting indexed in Google.

If someone is writing libelous statements about you online, there are many different ways you can go about getting them removed. Easiest would be to send them a Cease and Desist letter. If that doesn’t work, you can go after their web host and request that their hosting be terminated. Neither one of these are very good solutions — most of us aren’t going to legally go after someone living on the other side of the world and if their web host terminates their account, they can always create a new account at another web host. You can file a UDRP but even if you win, what’s stopping them from registering another domain with your name in it? Instead of ReeceBerg.com, they can register Reece-Berg.com or even Reece-Berg-Is-A-Scammer.com. One of the best ways to “clean” search engine results might very well be to do a little bowling — Google Bowling, that is.

We all know that certain things you do on your website can get your site penalized by search engines — some examples include paid links and too many links from bad neighbourhoods (eg. thousands of links in unrelated directories and/or websites). This is playing dirty but so are they — and this does work. Sure, they can just make another website once again ( just as they could in all the other examples), however this is one way that will pretty much always work, so long as the person bad mouthing you isn’t doing so on an authority website. Knowing that almost all search engine traffic comes from first page results, all we need to do is get them off the first page. An alternative strategy we could use would be to build websites (or use existing websites) and optimize pages on them for our name(s) [in the case this is also being done maliciously to businesses you own]. As an example, I could use this website to optimize a page for “Reece Berg” and because it’s has a fair bit of trust in Google’s eyes, I could probably get a page linked to on the homepage ranked well on Google fairly quickly. If you’re not up against much competition, you might even be able to knock results off the first page by posting on other blogs — as an example, DotWTF.com frequently leaves comments on my blog and if you Google “DotWTF.com”, you should see links to a couple posts on this blog where he’s left comments. Submitting articles to article directories, such as EzineArticles can also help push your name up to the top. It’s obviously more desirable that the top search results link to websites owned by you, however this is certainly preferable to having top search results maliciously attacking you.

Related posts:

1. Social Media’s Effect on Search Engines
2. Website Cleansing
3. Increasing Page Views