News Articles - Forming Your Reputation

One thing that many people fail to utilize in managing their online reputation are archived newpaper articles. Generally, if you do something that is noteworthy enough to get you mentioned in your local newspaper (or even if it is the New York Times), it's either something that is very positive in nature or very negative. Either way, archived news articles will stay hosted on publications' websites for years and years, so it's something that needs to be managed to benefit your online reputation - either by pushing those news stories up in the rankings, or by pushing them down. If there is a story out there about how you helped contribute to a charitable event, link to it. Link to it from your blog, your personal home page, and tag it in del.icio.us. Increasing its link popularity will definitely give it a boost in the SERPs.

What if the story is a negative one? First question to ask is whether or not there are other stories hosted on that publication's that are about you. One method of pushing a bad story out of the SERPs that is hosted on a fairly prominent domain (like a large city's newspaper or even a highly popular blog) is to add to or link to other page within that same domain that are not negative. If you are a public figure, chances are there are multiple articles about you hosted on most news domains. By increasing the link popularity of the positive stories you can force out the negative ones rather quickly as the search engines do not index more than 2 pages for a specific domain near the top of the SERPs (unless you are talking snippet links of course but that does not apply here).