Copy Brighter

Sometimes a negative result will stick to the front page of Google's index, and it will won't move easily – no matter how much content or links you create. In these situations, removing the links that point to a negative page can make it appear less relevant, and therefore less visible in the search results. By following the same general procedures as link building, you can persuade Webmasters to remove links to negative pages.

There are currently three main strategies for reducing the relevance of negative search engine results:

1. Build up positive and neutral content to outrank the negative page.
   
2. Negotiate or pull strings to get the negative page removed.
   
3. Ask other Webmasters to remove their links to the negative page.
   

I call the third technique "reverse" link building. It works best in smaller cases where there are less than a hundred links to the negative page. Reverse link building is challenging because the Webmaster has already written content and decided to link to a negative result - and you have to convince them to re-think their decision and change what is there. People can get really analytical and philosophical about why they are getting edited or censored - and look "too far" into your request.

Here are some best practices for removing links to a negative article:

Find All the Links to Negative Page

Go to Yahoo Site Explorer. Paste the full URL of the negative article into the search box and click the "Explore URL" button, then click the blue link that says "Inlinks." This will show all of the pages linking to the negative article. An easier way to do this is through install SEOpen, an excellent SEO extension for Firefox.

You can also look at the trackbacks of a negative blog post to see which other blogs are "endorsing" it - or you can look in Technorati for "reactions" to a blog or blog post. Make an exhaustive list of all the negative links in a spreadsheet. Then go examine the sites closely to see where they link to the negative content.

Finding the Person With the Power to Remove the Negative Link

The first challenge is finding up-to-date contact information for the Webmaster of each site that links to the negative article. If you're really lucky, you'll find a working e-mail or phone number listed on the site. Otherwise: do a WhoIs and write down all the phone numbers, use the contact form and look at the source code, Google search for any nicknames, look closely into any affiliate links for clues, check the backlink profile to find related sites linking to it. Look into the internet archives cache or prior registrations to see if you can find the old owners. If you still can't find any clues or solid contact information, then leave a blog comment or guestbook post – or even place an order (!) – and leave a note with your e-mail address, asking them to contact you about an urgent matter pertaining to their website.

Using Tact and Persuasion to Negotiate Removal

For the initial contact, I've found it's best not to get too detailed and heavy right off the bat. Start by making a connection and showing that your e-mail is not spam.

Hi! My name is Brett, and I appreciate the detailed information you have up at ExplicitVitaminReviews.com. For years I have taken Vitamin C to boost my immune system, but I had no idea the brand they sell at my local K-mart is biologically inactive. I'll definitely look into the California Sunshine line of supplements you recommend."

Next, you're going to have to ask VERY nicely, and make a good case for why the link should be removed. You might want to save it for the next e-mail or a phone call, and just establish connection with the first contact. If you come across as a threat, hassle or annoyance at any point in the process - you will lose. Be friendly. And be pleasantly persistent.

Reasons Why They Should Take It Down

Often times, Webmasters "innocently" link to negative articles because they are trying to be fair and balanced – to tell both sides of the story. Explain that the article is having a negative impact on your website, and give some of the following reasons why it should be removed, if appropriate:

1. The information is out of date.
2. The information is false / inaccurate.
3. The website is a bad neighborhood you don't want to link to.
4. The article is a 'revenge piece' written by a competitor.
5. The link doesn't really add any value to their readers.
6. There is a much better contrary view at http://example.com
7. The link means little to them, but has significant impact on your site

If e-mail doesn't get a response after a couple of tries, move to telephone and lastly send a non-threatening personal letter. Ask for the removal with kindness and humility. If that doesn't work, then offer to help the webmaster by giving them links, sending a thank you gift, or doing whatever you can to help their business and website. As a very last resort, you can offer payment.

If they are adamant about keeping a link to a negative article, suggest another better-quality article they could link to or ask them to rel="nofollow" it.

If you're really patient, intuitive and cool... you can get many of those negative links undone by using this strategy. A few weeks later, when all the pages get re-crawled, the negative result will appear less relative to the search engines.

Just as there are countless "credit repair" companies who claim they can erase past debts, there are now a multitude of reputation management firms claiming they can "remove negative search engine listings."

So, can negative listings actually be removed from Google? Not just making them less visible by pushing them down off the first page... but actually making it so the page no longer exists?

"Yes, it is possible to remove some types of pages."

But the most common kind of web reputation damage - strong pages on strong domains that have been consistently ranking for months or years - are often incredibly difficult to budge. The owner won't take them down till hell freezes over, you have no valid legal case, and Google won't give your (more recently created) pages the same weight.

But negative results can sometimes be permanently changed or removed with persistence, tact and savvy. Here's how:

8 Ways to Remove Negative Results from the Google

1. Ask Nicely
I've gotten nasty information removed by calling the blogger and having a nice long "blogger to blogger" talk with them. Appeal to their conscience. Explain why it's good for them to change the information, and explain why hosting negative or defamatory info might reflect poorly on their own website. Don't accuse them of bad journalism or insult them - respect the effort they took to make the content but urge them to consider an alternate headline, tone, etc. Ask if there's anything you could do to help them out in exchange (write a review, give a link, do SEO for their site, send them a "thank you" gift, etc.).


2. Ask the moderator to remove the offending thread or post
Sometimes the author of the information won't budge, but a forum or social site moderator will want to avoid conflict and will be more receptive to removing defamatory or misleading information. It usually doesn't hurt to ask.


3. Audit the site for Google Webmaster Guidelines violation, and report them
Check to see if the site is buying or selling any paid links, keyword stuffing, hiding text, cloaking content, or doing anything else in direct violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you find anything spammy, report the site to Google or report paid links inside of Google Webmaster Tools console.


4. File a DMCA Takedown Notice
If the site is infringing on your trademarks or copying your content, and they are located or hosted in the USA, you can file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice with the OSP (online service provider) and if that fails, you can file it with the search engines. Check out this excellent guide to enforcing copyrights.


5. Offer a Cash Payment / Settlement
Some people have successfully offered a cash settlement to have negative information down. A lot of online bloggers are in it for the money, and so are most of the reputation extortionists (Web publishers, like the RipoffReport, who encourage and directly profit from anonymous complaint content). It could be cheaper and easier to "pay to make it go away" than to pay for months of reputation management, content and link building efforts. Beware, though, of opening yourself up to ongoing extortion. And be careful of what you put in writing. You might want to contact the webmaster anonymously, by telephone, to test their response to such an offer, rather than send them a written letter or e-mail that they could reprint on their website.


6. Threaten a Lawsuit
You can send an official-looking letter threatening to sue people for defamation, and that could be enough to scare people into taking down content. Beware: if you threaten to sue someone, make sure you have a case and actually plan on following through with it, if necessary. Many times, I've seen legal threats backfire and make the situation flare up much worse. Threats of litigation bring out a harsh and unforgiving side in people, and it can prompt your defamer to want to "stick it to you" even worse.

For more detailed legal information on some of these suggestions, ChillingEffects.org or any of the excellent posts of SEOmoz's legal expert Sarah Bird are great places to start.

Blackhat Reputation Management Tactics:

It's important to be aware of some of the more heavy-handed tactics, even if you don't practice them yourself:

7. Negative SEO
For a long time, people believed that "nothing another Webmaster can do will be able to harm your websites' rankings." According to some black hat SEO experts, that is not true anymore. Negative SEO techniques, such as link spamming or buying penalized sites in a similar niche and 301 redirecting them to to your competitor's pages, are "enough to have a relatively dramatic impact on rankings." This Forbes article on negative SEO is pretty well-done and interesting.


8. Counter-Attack the Reputation of Your Critic
Some people have successfully counter-attacked their defamer, by anonymously exposing "fabricated" details of their past, making a YourDefamerSucks.com site, or filing a ripoff report about their business. This would theoretically give you a stronger bargaining position to suggest that you mutually withdraw the negative information - by kicking some empathy into your defamer. I haven't done this, as I am not really a "digital hitman" for hire - but I've heard others have done it successfully.

The Importance of Making Good Web Karma

In the social media era, we all live in very transparent, digital "glass houses." And throwing stones is as easy as a few clicks on the keyboard.

Remember that defaming others on the Web can have a profoundly destructive impact on their business, career and life.

Interact with kindness, humanity and positivity and start creating positive content now to build a spotless reputation on the Web. Monitor your reputation, and quickly and tactfully respond to grievances and to make sure they don't escalate or get cemented into the search results.

And think of these removal techniques as an emergency last resort, when all else has failed.

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I'd love to hear your own ideas and experiences with removing negative links in the search engines. Please leave your comments below...!

"Wow! Amazingly clear. Great writing. Invaluable insight."

That is what I found myself thinking, again and again, as I read Radically Transparent, Andy Beal and Judy Strauss's 368 page guide to monitoring and managing your reputation online.

I have mixed feelings about a lot of marketing books. They are either too breezy and conversational - like Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae (it's enjoyable and has great insights but you can read it and "get it" in about two hours.) Or else they are too dense and nearly impossible to sit down in a chair and savor (like Eugene Schwartz's seminal Breakthrough Advertising).

And at least half the time, books on Web stuff and technology are out of date by the time they are published.

"Radically Transparent: A Guide to Managing and Monitoring Your Reputation Online" is one of those rare, comprehensive texts that is also inimitably readable and enjoyable.

I respect this book because:

• It is well-researched. Lots of statistics, research and authority quotes are used to support the book's arguments.
  
  
• It's smoothly organized. Smooth idea flow, and "Thought Byte" and "Defining Moment" clarifications of key concepts.
  
  
• It's very up-to-date (as of March 2008). The examples are all respectable and relevant.
  
  
• It's comprehensive. Even if you know a lot about SEO and blogging, you might not know a lot about online photo and video best practices. And it all gets covered.
  
  
• It's lucid. Even if you understand some of the concepts covered, you probably can't explain them half as clearly as this book does.
  
  
• It's humble. Difficult and controversial subjects (like reputation attacks, fake blogs and paid links) are discussed in a neutral and unassuming fashion.
  
  

If you are a public relations professional, marketing director or a business owner, I can't think of a better introduction of blogging and social media with an emphasis on reputation management.

If you are an SEO, social media marketer or reputation management professional, I can recommend it just as highly. Here's why: Even if you know quite a bit about online reputation management, you most likely don't have the breadth of experience that Beal and Strauss have explaining it to clients. They take complex concepts and make them elegantly simple. This book will pay you back at least 10 times the cover price when helps you verbally straighten out a client's misunderstanding, or when it helps you land a new contract.

I didn't know about several of the social sites and services it recommends, and reading it would have saved me hours on previous campaigns. It also has dozens of tips about branding, tagging, naming domains, writing for engagement, images, video, and reputation management theory that are ace.

This book might not give up any deep inside secrets about Google's algorithm or advanced profile hacking tactics. But it's just as well, because those will be history by the time the year is finished - and they probably aren't fit to "print" in a paper book.

Radically Transparent is a substantial, informative work and I predict it will be a respected resource on online reputation management for years to come.

It's well worth buying and owning.

Running an affiliate program is incredibly dangerous for those concerned about their online reputation. Here's why:

By paying people to promote your product, you are giving your affiliates (and their competitors) direct incentive to create content about you and your brand.

And you have very little, if any, control over what they say about you.

In the first decade of online affiliate marketing (the 90's), people mostly stuck to the positive. They would create glowing reviews about products that offered commissions. And they would give the highest rating to products that paid the highest commissions.

But just as television content is becoming more shocking, more explicit, and more edgy to maintain waning levels of viewer attention... affiliate marketing is getting meaner and more cut-throat, also.

The Dark Side: Anti-Marketing

The dark side of affiliate marketing is based on a simple flaw of human psychology - where "bad news sells better than good news." Reverse psychology works well and bad reviews are much more magnetic than positive stuff. The trade term for this kind of promotion style is "anti-marketing."

I blame The Rich Jerk as the person primarily responsible for pushing this trend to the tipping point, by teaching it as a premium "secret marketing technique" to thousands of newbie affiliates in his ebook. Nowadays, it has become standard practice for affiliates to declare your product a "scam" in the title and description tags, in order to get more attention and clicks. They will viscously bash your product and try to send you to a landing page for a competing product that pays them better commission:

Even affiliates who wholeheartedly believe in your product - who are actively trying to promote it - will engage in anti-marketing nastiness, in order to get more attention and clicks:

The Downward Spiral

The negative meme tends to spread quickly, regardless if there is any evidence to support it. It incubates when pay-per-click gets oversaturated with dirty ads. Average people who are interested in your program read the affiliate pages proclaiming that "it's a scam!," and they start posting on blogs and forums to ask if it's really a scam or not. Before long, the top organic listings fill with a dirty speedball of libelous affiliate pages and skeptical user generated content - casting a nasty shadow of doubt on your good reputation.

At this point, your brand is permanently stigmatized and your conversions will drop off sharply.

Suggestions for Affiliate Marketers:

1. If you run your own affiliate program, make it an explicit part of your terms and conditions that "anti-marketing" is not allowed, and people who advertise your program as a "scam" will be promptly and permanently removed from the program. Make this clear up front. But be tactful: A booted, disgruntled affiliate who knows how to promote pages is potentially very dangerous. He can easily turn to an affiliate competitor who strongly encourages him to bash your brand.
   
   
2. If pay-per-click ads get out of control with negative dirt, you can try to register your trademark with AdWords (or another PPC network) and prevent people from using it. The specific rules and enforcement vary from network to network.
   
   
3. Most importantly: Start building a formidable front page presence of strong pages and profiles before your affiliates and competitors do. Let the peanut gallery affiliate pages show up on page 3 - taking a back seat to the solid portfolio of pages, subdomains, press releases, profiles and blogs that you already created and populated LONG BEFORE they ever heard about your program.
   
   

Even if you aren't running an affiliate program, learn from the drama in the industry. Understand how easily third party anti-marketing can damage your legitimate business without cause. Start building your web profile now and don't wait until it's too late, because repairing your online reputation is much more expensive and SEO labor-intensive than preventive reputation management.


Read the rest of this entry »

Getting your home page to the top of the search results used to be the pinnacle of search engine success. But now that online reputation management is increasingly important, it's essential to cultivate multiple top listings.

Creating a secure online identity profile usually requires at least 10 or 20 pages that rank for your name. It takes effort to build, groom and strengthen all these pages – but the security they will provide is worth it.

Don't Make Too Many Profiles

Each type of search result (profile page, press release, blog post, etc.) has its own signature look, so even to the untrained eye, too many user-generated social profiles on the first page look unnatural. It looks even worse if the profiles all say something similar or they have phony sounding self-praise in the description.

Camouflage Through Diversity

Google deliberately avoids showing too many listings from one domain or "flavor," and it usually shows a wide variety of sites and opinions so that users can find what they want quickly.

Cultivate a natural look for your brand in the search results by strengthening the positive and neutral results that already exist naturally. Get some links to the university alumni news bulletin that mentions you. Make some profiles that point to the blog by the Australian guy with the same name. Or take that non-competing company with a similar name on page 2, and put it in the Yahoo! directory.

Diverse listings look natural. The diversity will draw people's eyes to the pages that are obviously about you - where profile overload can encourage them to dig deeper back into the search results and uncover the "dirt."

When negative publicity stings, it's tempting to try and "force" bad results away by overloading. But remember: Google doesn't want you to build links or throw up dozens of new listings overnight. It treats quick changes with suspicion.

So be patient. And don't botch your online reputation by rushing.

Building Quality Profiles and Finding Links for Them

Social media sites let you create pages and links on relatively strong domains. Occasionally domains fall out of Google's favor and popular link sources get "nofollowed," but new dozens of new social sites and services are launched every day. Find them and use them to gracefully build out the foundation of your online identity portfolio.

Lots of thin, spammy profiles won't get you far. Instead, build a few profiles up with real content (blog posts, photos, friends, unique and valuable information) that will make them interesting enough to link to. Your Flickr "Pro" profile can be filled with incredible, rare travel photos. An Amazon profile can contain a substantial review of a new product that bloggers and shopping comparison sites will reference. Your company Del.icio.us profile can be developed into an up-to-date, "creme de la creme" link resource for your industry.

It's not easy to get quality links for personal and profile pages, but every page has a natural link partner somewhere out there on the internet. With some creativity and elbow-grease, you can make your profiles content-rich and compelling enough to get the internal and external links that will help them float to the top of the search results and stay there.

Then you'll have some control over the first page, and random user-generated comments and content is much more likely to show up on the second or third.

It's important to act quickly - the moment an online reputation issue is first detected. The longer you leave an undesirable search result to sit in the open, unchallenged, the more likely it will get "cemented" into place. When an interesting result stays on the first page or two of the search engine results, people (and automated content scraping sites) have a tendency to link to it and reinforce it.

Here are 13 types of pages that can contain negative buzz:

1. Authoritative Government Pages

The reputation management kiss of death is an entire negative page on an powerful government website. If the US Embassy, Federal Post Office, or the Securities and Exchange Commission dedicate a web page to warning about you, it's almost impossible to compete with.

2. Feature Articles on Top-Tier News Sites

Top-tier news sites (CNN, BBC) pack a lot of domain strength - and they stick to search result pages pretty hard.

3. Popular Wikipeida Entries

The general populace has adopted the site it as the quickie research tool of choice - and their countless citations have strengthened it. Many Wikipedia entries on companies or public figures contain a "criticism" section, but the contents are supposed to contain verifiable facts (lawsuits, convictions, news incidents). You generally don't have to worry about people saying you "suck," but widely-held opinions and factual incidents can get worked into Wikipedia.

4. Articles On Authority Blogs

As at 97th Floor noted, popular blog posts can be very dangerous. A post with dozens or hundreds of comments denotes significant buzz and interest, and it also creates copious amounts of keyword-rich content. Best respond to negative blog posts quickly - by contacting the author, responding in the comments and taking SEO action – as appropriate.

5. "...Sucks.com" sites.

Dot com sites that contain the keyword plus a pejorative term in the URL are a challenge, but they aren't impossible. They have a sticky tendency to linger around, because search engines (particularly Google) like to display a wide, balanced range of opinions and content so users can pick their own flavor. Sometimes "...sucks.com" or "...scam.com" sites are propped up by just a handful of links from the owner and they can be worked around. But if they enjoy widespread support and link popularity, it can be a real uphill battle.

6. Rip-Off Report Listings

The Rip-Off Report is a notorious "consumer complaint" site that encourages people to vent their accusations and frustrations, and it allegedly profits from blackmailing business owners. Because the content is so "interesting" it enjoys a lot of domain authority in Google, but I've found its listings can often be outranked with a little bit of elbow grease.

7. Active Social Media Profiles

Social networking sites are link rich and user-generated content pages on them can rank well. An active social media account with your brand in the username could theoretically outrank your company's official site.

8. Press Releases

Syndicated press releases can show up strongly in the search results, but they are often temporary and fade out with time (especially if they don't get picked up).

9. Personal Blogs

Personal blogs and others with limited readership and anemic link strength are easy enough to outrank with any of the kinds of pages listed above.

10. Forum Posts

These days, search engines seems to be show more respect for blogs than forum posts and some forum software creates posts with poor on-page optimization and dynamic URLs. But watch out: over time, an interesting forum post can develop into a comprehensive, linked-to authority document on a brand or topic.

11. Made for AdSense (MFA) or Weak Affiliate Pages

As domain trust and on-page analysis (looking for affiliate code, link networks, 'quality score') becomes more advanced, pages that are highly commercialized - without a quality backlink profile to support them - tend to be rather wimpy.

12. Off-topic Pages

Pages that are completely focused on a subject (mentioning it in the title tag, headlines, and numerous times in the text) are typically much stronger than pages that just "randomly" mention a person or brand once down in the bottom. You can sometimes identify an off-topic page because the description will be pulled from the text and truncated with an ellipses ("..."). Creating your own page just about anywhere and optimizing it can often outrank off-topic page mentions.

13. Spam pages

There are thousands of automated bots scour the web, looking for fresh content to turn into a word salad of web spam for a quick buck. Sometimes they will "scrape" negative news items or headlines from the search results and re-display it. Random spam pages are typically the weakest of all web pages, and they can be overtaken by just about any other kind of web page.

What Do You Think?

These ratings are very rough estimates based on my own experience with reputation management campaigns. However, every single situation and search result page is different!

What kinds of search results have you found to be the most difficult to outrank?

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If you want your social media profile pages to rank highly in the search results, it's important to build links for them. There are billions of pages in Google's index and only those pages with enough linkjuice are going to reach the front page in a competitive query.

Getting quality external links to social media profiles can be difficult, but you can often get good internal links with just a little bit of participation. And those internal links are a very powerful, underrated SEO ranking factor.

Take a look at Tribe.net, an "underground" social networking community that is popular with bellydancers and the Burning Man set. For every discussion group ("tribe") that you join, it creates an internal link back to your profile. The same thing happens when you add someone as a friend. If you joined a few hundred tribes, you would get a generous flow of internal linkjuice back to your profile and blog, where you can link out to anything (without a nofollow tag).

My friend ZagZag has a several hundred internal links and just one lone external link (according to Yahoo Site Explorer) and she has a toolbar PageRank of 4. A well-connected page like this is strong and much more likely to show up in the search results than an orphan profile page with no friends.

A similar thing happens on the popular microblogging site Twitter. The more people that follow you, the more little icons create internal links back to your profile. New media consultant Marshall Kirkpatrick has over 1500 followers, each with a tiny icon that links back to his page, pimping his profile up to a toolbar PageRank 5.

On social bookmarking sites, one of the more powerful ways to funnel internal linkjuice is through tagging. Take a site like Del.icio.us, where the external links are "nofollowed" but the internal ones are juicy. For each tag you add to your bookmark, your bookmark will then get added to the corresponding "tag" page with a internal link back to your profile page.

If you very generously describe your submissions with tags that correspond to popular, high-ranking tag pages, your profile will get some sweet, del.icio.us linkjuice.

Bonus tip: For reputation management purposes, sometimes you just need a page - almost any page - to show up in the search results. The internal tag pages on popular social sites like Propeller or Wordpress.com can rank very strongly. If you wanted to rank for "Blockbuster Video," then just make several submissions or blog posts with those tags and see where it takes you. If the tag page isn't strong enough to rank from the internal links, build some externals. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes the need to remove negative publicity is very real and overpowering:

In case you are victim of an unwarranted attack, or you need to overpower a pesky duplicate brand – here are some proven online reputation management tactics.

You'll Probably Need Links

Some articles suggest that online reputation management is easy. They say all you have to do is make a bunch of MySpace profiles and Squidoo lenses. If Bill Lumberg of Initech were an online reputation manager, he'd say, "Ummm..... yyyyeeeeeah...... Right."

Just making profiles might work for little-known brands or obscure personal names. But what if you're working on a nationally known company or famous person, and it's exceedingly difficult to rank for their name? What if the dirt is being dished out by multiple international news sites packing PR 9 domains? In these cases, you need to choose your profiles sites carefully, optimize the pages well, and point lots of good links at them. And you're gonna have to do this all discreetly, without attracting attention of the UGC site admins or making a dirty backlink profile in the search engines.
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This week I've been doing some work for a national brand that is suffering from a serious reputation crisis. Some customers think that they are misleading, and they have said their piece on high-ranking blogs and watchdog sites. The company execs are shaking in their loafers, incredibly humbled at how much power a couple of TypePad bloggers and home-spun websites with crappy graphics have. The illusion that they could do anything they wanted while keeping total control over their brand evaporated pretty darn quick. Last night, I came across an example of how not to handle a reputation problem online from Video Professor:

The video tutorial publisher recently sued a bunch of anonymous online commenters who said they got ripped off on a consumer watchdog forum. For instance, a disgruntled user named "Bob" writes:

"After clicking on two offers for a trial I realized that I didn't want any part of this scam and tried to cancel. I thought this was the last I would hear from these people. They billed my credit card later for charges I never approved. I canceled with them and I'm still being billed. This is fraud and I want to see a class action lawsuit to put them out of business. They ought to put that guy in jail, not on TV. He is a crook."

First lesson, beware whenever you see the asterisk qualifier next to the word "Free." Next, go check out the mixed-bag of Google search results for Video Professor. If you believe the numerous online reviews, Video Professor engaged in some rather unsavory bait-and-switch and billing practices. If you believe the company, then they are the victim of a massive, malicious and carefully-cloaked anonymous slander campaign. You be the judge. The local paper found the company's lawsuit questionable and wrote about it last week. Soon the story got picked up tech blogs. Then it got posted to Digg, got made popular there, and it got filtered onto all kinds of news aggregators and other social sites. People started linking to the articles en masse, making the reputation wounds all the deeper, more permanent and more visible. Here's What NOT to Do, When Managing Your Online Reputation:

• Don't initially contact the offending site in writing to beg, bribe or threaten them into removing negative info. It's too easy to post it all up on the Web for everyone to see. Try contacting them by telephone, if possible.
• Beware of making a Wikipedia listing if the grievances against your client are substantial. It's very easy and common for people to add "criticism" subsection that anyone can contribute to, like in this article on Video Professor.
• Don't lash back at the criticism and make yourself look like an "evil jerk." If you do decide to respond, wait till you feel calm and do it with exceeding humility and tact.
• Resist the temptation towards the old-school tactic of threatening and filing lawsuits, as this often backfires. Many Diggers and bloggers embrace the culture of rage, and throughly enjoy dishing out vigilante justice on corporate villains and outing political and legal absurdities. It's their favorite way to flex power and "Save the world" with a few clicks of a keyboard. Just ask the man who sued the dry cleaners for $54,000,000 for ruining his pants.
• Beware of posting fake reviews or shilling. Experienced Web surfers and social media vigilantes will be able to spot you a mile away. If you must flog or post glowing reviews about yourself, at least give yourself a primer with Andy's excellent post on Fake Review Optimization (FRO).
• Don't try to cheat if you can't take the heat. You're sure to get busted on sites like Yelp, Rip Off Report, or Reddit (if you're a politician). Yeah, it's hard to make a living, especially as an entrepreneur, and the temptation to cut corners or employ sketchy business models is always there. People got away with all kinds of schemes and scams in the 70's, 80's or even 90's - when the flow of information was asymmetrical - but they don't work in the social media era! Ask Scientology.

Some of the A-list bloggers have written "comprehensive" guides to online reputation management, but I found them to be rather basic. The best single article I've found is Planet Ocean's excellent Online Reputation Management Guide. I've seen a lot of good results from making subdomains (like Microsoft) with good content on them, and I've seen profile pages on high-ranking social media sites with juicy links pointing at them (or hell, even 200 comment spams from .gov and .edu blogs) at get miraculous rankings. Perhaps the simplest and best advice on online reputation management comes from MC Hammer. In the social media era, buzz travels very fast and you can't be "too legit" enough. If you consistently make people mad, you really need to stop and examine your business practices. Then, do whatever you can to quickly make amends and douse the flames (see Apple's letter after the iPhone price dive). If you've done wrong (even inadvertently), swallow your pride and issue some apologies or refunds - it will probably be much cheaper than the damage negative buzz will do to your brand. Don't stoke up the sparks and turn them into fires, like Video Professor did. Cuz' the hammer can come down hard, and then it will really cost you.

Chorus "Too legit... Too legit to quit (hey...hey...) Too legit...too legit... Too legit to quit...(hey...) Too legit... Too legit to quit (too legit...) too legit... too legit to quit..""