In fact, Google Search engineer Matt Cutts has said that Penguin 2.0 will have an even greater, “deeper” impact than the first Penguin. For online reputation management pros, that sounds a bit daunting, especially since Google is not revealing exactly what the new algorithmic update will do. With that said, there are some educated guesses that can be made, and some important ways for online reputation management pros to protect themselves from Penguin’s wrath.

Penguin 2.0 at a Glance

While Google has not revealed specifically what Penguin 2.0 will do, it has certainly offered some hints. The search engine has made it fairly clear that it plans to continue penalizing sites that try to “game” the system, specifically focusing on link farms and other illicit link activity. Indeed, within the search community, it is widely anticipated that the new Penguin will be all about devaluing link spam.

How to Prepare for Penguin 2.0

For online reputation management professionals, there are a few implications here, three specific ways to guard against further Penguin tumult; all of them, of course, pertain to backlinks, sure to be Penguin’s focus.

• First, evaluate and understand your site’s link profile. Since the first Penguin, Google has made ample use of its Link Disavowal tool, collecting data and putting together what will likely be a more sophisticated anti-spam algorithm. Use tools like Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer to see what kind of links you are getting, and try your best to remove any that seem to have low backlink power.
• Disavow or remove whatever links you have from link farms, which will likely be the main target of Penguin 2.0. Also disavow links from adult websites, from sites that or irrelevant to your own, or from sites that use overly-optimized anchor text.
• Third and finally, make sure you are working hard to develop relationships with good, high-quality sites. This means creating good content, linking out to relevant sites, and being active in e-mailing or tweeting bloggers and webmasters from whom you wish to solicit links. As always, guest blogging is also vital for online reputation management pros.

Ready for Penguin?

The long and short of it is that a new incarnation of Penguin is coming soon, and if Google’s hype is to be believed, this new algorithmic update promises to be the most significant in Internet history. This is something online reputation management professionals will want to prepare for as best as possible. Start with these basic tips for overhauling your linking activities, and you’ll be well on your way to Penguin-proofing your ORM endeavors.

Why Kids Resort to Sexting

First of all, it is crucial to address the question of why kids begin sexting in the first place. There are several basic causes:

• Peer pressure, or cyberbullying
• Problems with self-esteem or with body image
• Rebelliousness, a desire to do something taboo and to ignore the rules set out for them
• As a genuinely romantic gesture, or as a sexual favor in exchange for some other service

Some further points to ponder: Girls are more likely to send sexually explicit photos than boys, through not by much. Moreover, about 80 percent of teens in the U.S, say that they believe sexting is morally wrong—yet many of those same teens do it anyway.

Sexting and Online Reputation Management

There are plenty of reasons why parents should seek to prevent their kids from sexting, and one of the main ones is that it can lead to serious online reputation management problems down the road. Remember that if these explicit photos are captured, stored, saved to Facebook, or broadcast through any other online means, they’re more or less going to be on the Internet forever. There are ways to suppress these images, but no way to fully remove them from the Web—meaning the best response to sexting is to stop it before it even begins.

What Parents Can Do

For parents worried about sexting and online reputation management, and zealous to spare their kids from cyberbullying, there are a few basic tips to consider.

• The most important thing is daily communication. Ask your kids what they’ve been doing on their phones, who they have been texting with, and what kind of social media use they have engaged in.
• Don’t be hesitant to talk candidly about your digital/social media life. This kind of openness will help your kids to talk with you more freely.
• Keep your family computer, and your kids’ laptops, in an open family room, not in private bedrooms—or, at the very least, have a doors-open policy.
• Create a healthy digital environment in your home. Have some times where all cell phones—including your own—are banned so that you can enjoy family time together, even if it is just the time you spend around the dinner table. This gives your kids a break from the constant peer pressure they receive through text messages and social media updates.

The bottom line is that having an open dialogue about technology, and making sure your kids know where you stand on sexting, is a great way to make online reputation management a family priority.

These are familiar points to regular readers of the Reputation Changer blog, of course, but Forbes illuminates them with some sobering new statistics. The article reports that an astonishing 90 percent of executive recruiters say they conduct online research for all potential candidates. 70 percent of employers who use LinkedIn say that they have chosen not to hire a person because of the person’s online reputation. And, troublingly, only 27 percent of employers provide candidates with a chance to explain their online reputations; the rest simply throw out any applications that raise red flags.

Reputation Monitoring

All of this “suggests that job seekers should be thinking as much about their online persona as their interview attire,” the article continues. The first tip from Forbes is to check your online identity. Simply running searches on a few different search engines is a good way for job-seekers to get a sense of where they stand. Says Forbes, at least one of the top five search results for any given name should be a professional listing; if LinkedIn doesn’t crack the top five, then it’s clearly time to update and revitalize your LinkedIn page. (We would add that throwing in a Completed.com profile is helpful here, as well.)

Make Yourself Stand Out

From there, Forbes recommends that jobseekers use their various social media profiles to help put their best foot forward with potential employers. This does not necessarily mean that all social media profiles need to be 100 percent job-focused; listing any and all accomplishments, such as the completion of a half marathon or even the completion of a good business book, can go a long way. Here are, a Completed.com profile would be especially helpful.

The article also advocated for Quora, a site that allows users to ask and answer questions on a variety of topics. Naturally, this is a good place for jobseekers to boost their professional credibility. Notes Forbes, “you can build a positive online reputation by answering questions that align with your professional background. You can also show off your personal interests by answering questions about the city you live in or places you would like to visit.”

Suppress the Negatives

Finally, the article recommends that jobseeker manually go through their social media profiles to ensure there is nothing there they would not want potential employers to see—but also that they triple-check privacy settings. Keeping negative content contained and suppressed is, after all, a vital step toward online reputation management, and for those looking for employment, it is utterly imperative.

Amy’s offenses were many—she did everything from using frozen ravioli to screaming at her waitresses, and even took their tip money—but to hear her tell it, her business’ decline all began—where else—on Yelp.com. Amy told Ramsay she was the victim of cyberbullying and online defamation, neither of which are completely illegitimate possibilities.

While cyberbullying is a major problem faced by today’s business owners, the bottom line is that Amy made all of her online reputation management problems a thousand times worse by responding in all the wrong ways. She went so far as to respond aggressively—and often with ample profanity—to all of the reviews and social media comments directed at her, which is really what has turned her situation into such a social media feeding frenzy.

It’s all very bad news for Amy, but for the rest of us, it is a good time to rehash a few basic pointers about online review response:

• First, you should never reply to every single Yelp review that you get. If Amy is telling the truth—if indeed she was victimized by online bullies—then she never should have “stood up to them” with her responses, which clearly drew more attention to the negative comments and made her public image issues far direr.
• Another lesson learned from Amy is to never reply to online reviews in the heat of the moment. Anyone who watched her on Kitchen Nightmares knows that she is a bit of a hothead—another understatement, perhaps—and she exemplifies all the reasons why it is imprudent for business owners to respond to their reviews angrily and hastily.
• It is amazing that this one even needs saying, but: Don’t insult people. Don’t insult your customers, your potential customers, or even your toughest online critics. Amy seemingly went on Facebook (she alleges the account was hacked) and announced that all of her customers were ignorant and that they had no idea what good food is—a pretty obvious PR blunder.
• A final point: Never lie. Anything you post online that is untrue is going to come back to bite you. Amy got slammed pretty hard for all her back-tracking, and the last thing you want is to make the same mistakes she did.

As of right now, Amy has enlisted the services of a PR firm to bring Amy’s Baking Company back into public favor. One wonders if she may have been better off consulting with an online reputation management team.

All of that said, it’s a prudent idea for business owners to rehearse some strategies for dealing with negative reviews, smoothly and without losing their heads. A recent Business 2 Community article offers five pointers that are, for the most part, pretty apt. We’ve rounded them up in the paragraphs that follow.

Step 1: Breathe.

The first tip offered in the article is for business owners to simply pause, take a step back, and to think through their response. This is very much opposed to the strategy of firing off a quick and ill-conceived response, driven more by emotion than by any inclinations toward online reputation management. The more time you spend cooling off, the more likely you are to formulate a truly constructive response.

Step 2: Take it Personally.

You might assume a good attitude toward online reviews is to not take them personally, but Business 2 Community has the opposite perspective. The article notes that negative reviews—at least, those that offer actual words of criticism, outside of outright defamation—offer business owners with an opportunity to reflect on their product and service offerings, and to make necessary adjustments. View negative reviews as chances to make your company even better—and to avoid similar complaints in the future.

Step 3: Respond Politely.

The third step is to offer a response that is simple, but polite. Remember that anyone who takes the time to leave you negative feedback is, clearly, pretty outspoken. As such, responding in condescension could provoke them into making your situation much worse.

Step 4: Don’t Ignore.

The article continues by advising business owners to never ignore their online reviews. This, of course, is a tip that ReputationChanger.com does not totally back. Generally, ignoring is a bad idea—but when a review is simply nasty and defamatory, issuing a response often does little good, and in fact only draws more attention to the bad review.

Step 5: Turn Off Your CAPS LOCK.

The final tip from Business 2 Community is to turn off your CAPS LOCK when you respond. Posting in CAPS LOCK mode is the online equivalent of screaming. This is not the way to appear cool, calm, and collected as you respond to online criticism!

For businesses, review response and online reputation management go hand in hand. Sadly, responding to bad reviews in a non-angry way is often quite difficult, but it is worth the effort. Again, responding to criticism in a hasty and angry way is only going to dig your hole deeper.

As far as that goes, online reputation management companies can expect a particularly eventful summer season. Google Webmaster has just released a new video in which the search engine’s engineer, Matt Cutts, lists nine big changes looming in the next three or four months. We’ve summarized these nine changes below.

Nine Things for Online Reputation Management Companies to Watch For

• First and foremost, this summer will bring the next iteration of Penguin—Penguin 2.0.  This new algorithmic update, designed to target black hat SEO tactics and spam, is said to be more comprehensive than the original Penguin, and will have a deeper and broader impact.
• Google will also be getting more aggressive in its fight against advertorials, Cutts states; advertorials often violate Google’s quality guidelines, but Cutts says that webmasters can avoid penalties by making sure that advertorials are clearly and obviously marked as paid advertising.
• Google will also be addressing “payday loans” in .co.uk domains, and targeting other specific areas (such as porn queries) that have traditionally been pretty heavy on spam.
• Though the Google video does not go into any specifics on this point, Cutts does say that the plan is to make link buying less effective; evidently, there are some detailed link analysis ideas in the works, meant to tackle link buying pretty aggressively.
• Google is also rolling out some new tools for alerting webmasters when their sites are hacked. These next-gen hacker detection tools will hopefully provide pretty detailed information to webmasters, as well as tips for cleaning up their sites and remedying the problem.
• Google will also begin to emphasize authority more than ever before, undergoing new measures to make sure authoritative sites are ranked higher than non-authoritative sites on the same topic.
• Cutts says that Google will be addressing sites that were impacted by Panda, and perhaps unfairly so, by developing news ways to detect and to help sites that are in a “gray area” as far as quality is concerned.
• Cutts says we can also expect some changes to search results clusters from the same site. Essentially, clusters of results from the same site will become less common deep Google searches—that is, searches that take you to the fifth page of results or beyond.
• Finally, online reputation management companies and other webmasters will note that Google plans to provide more information via its Webmaster Tools—hopefully information that will make it easier to comply with all of these changes!

The bottom line for online reputation management pros is that Google’s algorithmic changes are always worth noting, and based on what Cutts says, this summer is going to be jam-packed with major shifts and updates.

Pinterest and ORM

Companies wishing to leverage the power of Pinterest to build up their brands can and should try any and all of the following approaches:

• You can use Pinterest to build a community of followers and fans—folks who are potential ambassadors for your brand. Build a community by rewarding those folks who follow you with contests, exclusive content, sneak peaks at upcoming products or services, and more.
• Collaborate with other players in your industry, as well as with consumers. An example from the article is that a home furnishings store might regularly re-pin creative content from an interior design firm.
• Create and populate special, specific boards. Rather than posting everything to one company board, create boards with different topics and themes. If you own an arts and crafts store, you might create a board with a Back to School theme; if you own a plumbing company, you might come up with a Green Plumbing Tips board, a DIY Repair Board, and so on.
• Drive traffic by using Pinterest in conjunction with numerous different sites. Put Pin-It buttons on every page of your company blog. Sprinkle them throughout your company website. Even link to your Pinterest account through Twitter and Facebook.
• Above all, make sure the images you choose look great and grab the attention of your users. Avoid pixelated images, and make sure they do not exceed 554 pixels. Avoid flash content. Test images before making hem public. Finally, always include descriptions of your images!
• In fact, writing descriptions is one of the most important parts of using Pinterest. The descriptions you write are not mere afterthoughts, but rather should be given to your top copywriters.
• Post videos to Pinterest, but be selective in doing so. Post only the videos that you know to be popular and crowd-pleasing from your website, your YouTube account, or your Vimeo account.
• Last but never least, make sure you track your progress and measure the impact of your various Pinterest endeavors.

Pinterest Has Power

At Reputation Changer, we use Pinterest in all of our social media endeavors, and we have found it to be incredibly potent. By following these tips, you will likely have the same positive Pinterest experience. This is no mere social media upstart, but an utterly vital tool for any businesses and brands looking to make a splash on the Internet.

Claiming a Yelp Listing

It is vital for business owners to claim their Yelp profiles before business rivals or competitors beat them to it. Claiming a Yelp.com profile involves three simple steps:

• First, simply visit this page—the Yelp for Business Owners main hub—and click the “claim my business” option.
• Then, you will be taken to a page that asks you to type in the name of your business. There are three potential outcomes here. The first is that you will be asked to Unlock the Business, which just means offering some basic contact information and agreeing to the Yelp terms of service. The second outcome is that your business has been “Already Unlocked” by someone else. The third option is that Yelp.com will not be able to find your business at all.
• If you wind up with scenario #3, then you’ll be taken to a page where you can add your business to the Yelp directory. This just involves offering some basic details about the kind of company you have.

Optimizing a Yelp Listing

Once the listing is claimed, business owners then need to optimize it—an invaluable step in the ORM process. A few particular points to consider:

• Most importantly, make sure that you completely fill out your profile with all possible, pertinent information, including up-to-date hours of operation, contact information, etc.
• Add some quality photos of your business in action. This will boost user engagement on your Yelp profile by 2.5 times or more!
• Utilize keywords, in the same way that you would for your website. That is to say, don’t cram a keyword into every single clause in your Yelp profile, but do make sure you are organically working in some keywords that pertain to your business, your products and services, and so on.

Encouraging Reviews on Yelp

A final consideration for business owners is to do everything possible to encourage more good, strong, positive Yelp reviews—because ultimately, this is the best and only way to defend against a dismal online review profile. A few particular steps to take:

• Include, on your business website, a link to your Yelp.com profile.
• Include a Yelp.com link in your e-mail signature.
• Include Yelp links on both e-mail and paper invoices and receipts; you might even make paper flyers to hand out, if you have a business with a lot of in-store traffic.

For businesses seeking to do online reputation management, Yelp.com is not something that can be ignored, so claim and optimize your profile today.

Still, there are many who work in SEO and in online reputation management who continue to use those same, old-school tricks. As a recent Search Engine Watch article makes clear, these old ways of doing business are counterproductive, and so it is imperative for those who work in search to make sure their strategies are devoid of these no-longer-viable techniques. There are five, in particular, that SEO and ORM pros should avoid.

Keyword Stuffing

This is a practice that almost sounds quaint, in today’s SEO world—the practice of cramming content full of keyword after keywords. SEO pros used to stick keywords in title tags, meta tags, domain names, and in every other word of the action page content. Nowadays, keyword stuffing results in a penalty. The trick is to use keywords in a way that is natural and organic—even in title and meta tags, which is where many SEO pros continue to practice stuffing.

Hidden Text

Search Engine Watch goes on to list hidden text as a major SEO no-no. Back in the day, SEOs would use font colors that matched the background color of the page, stuffing keywords in a way that users, in theory, wouldn’t even notice. Today, the same practice is done via size=0 font and various scripting techniques. The bottom line is that Google only wants to reward content that benefits the user—which hidden text doesn’t.

Link Buying

Any link that is obtained through duplicitous means—or through simple payment—is now seen as a very bad thing by Google. This isn’t how things have always been, but in today’s SEO world, any link that is not won organically is not going to help your campaign. Even if you think you’re not guilty of this, there is always the possibility that you have inadvertently broken one of Google’s guidelines, so do a link audit every six months or so.

Content Just for Content’s Sake

Content is king, they say, but not all content is created equal. If you read your content out loud and it just drones on and on, to the point where it stops making sense, then you have too much filler. If you read your content and it’s less than 400 words or so, it’s probably too thin.

Too Many Ads

Finally, in today’s SEO environment, too much space devoted to ads can get you penalized. Here’s the rule of thumb: Hold a post-it-note up over the top-of-the-fold section of your website. If you have more ad space than what the post-it covers, then you have too much, period!

As such, it is important for doctors to know how to address their own online reviews, and to protect themselves against online defamation. This blog has covered such topics numerous times before. Additionally, it is helpful for consumers—or patients, more accurately—to understand the right and wrong ways to interpret medical review sites. The Fox News report has some good tips, and we have summarized some of the primary ones below.

Open-Loop vs. Closed-Loop Review Sites

First, patients should understand that there are basically two kinds of review site. The first is the open-loop review site. These sites allow anyone—literally anyone—to opine about a physician. As such, the reviews posted to these sites are in no way guaranteed to be valid; some may come from disgruntled employees, for example. These review sites are not really trustworthy, but sadly, they represent the bulk of the doctor review sites that are out there.

Closed-loop review sites work a bit differently. At these sites, you have to verify that you are an actual patient who had a recent appointment with the doctor in question before you are allowed to post a review. As such, these review sites are much more reliable sources of information.

Understanding Selection Bias

Patients also need to know that there is an inherent bias to the selection of reviews posted to any medical review site. Simple put, people who have great experiences with a doctor are not going to feel as strongly motivated to post feedback as patients who have miserable experiences. Therefore, a doctor may have 150 wonderful patient interactions and one really bad one, but the one really bad one is the only one that shows up on online review sites.

On a related note, patients should always check for any outliers. Say there is a doctor whose overall score is less than stellar; take a moment to investigate why that is. It may be that the doctor has 20 pretty good reviews, and just one really bad one, dragging down his or her score. This suggests that there was probably just one bad day or one unreasonable patient—not that the doctor is a terrible physician, necessarily.

Reading Reviews

One final word of advice for patients: Make sure that you are actually reading reviews instead of just checking out star ratings. Reading a review will sometimes reveal to you whether the reviewer is offering legitimate criticisms, or was perhaps just angry and upset.

Again, doctor review sites are unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon. What this means is that doctors need to take online reputation management seriously, but also that patients need to know just how far these medical review sites can be trusted.