By Kevin Howell


With the Internet at our fingertips, there are more online businesses offering products and services to users than ever. Since the rise in online shopping and the number of users surfing the Web, defamation of character has popped up in many cases. So how can you protect your name from online offenders?

Defamation of character can be truly damaging and harmful to a company or individual's image. Defamation of character refers to a written claim or statement or broadcast that can cause a negative impact on a product, service, business, individual, organization, or group. Defamation of character is also more commonly refer to "Libel" or "Slander". In this case, since we are talking about online images, the offender is known as the "Slanderer".

Those who commit defamation of character, or who are also referred to as "slanderers" usually consist of competitors, former disgruntled employees, and dissatisfied customers. These are the most common. However, there are also people out there who do it just to get a kick out of it.

So now that you are good and scared, what do you do to protect your business? Luckily there are a few options you can look into. You could always ignore the posted comments hoping that no one or notice or will take them seriously because you have a number of good, respectable comments giving your praise. Wrong again. Users and visitors today are less likely to take a chance signing up for a faulty or malfunctioning product or service.

Thankfully there is search engine reputation management. This technique can push those nasty comments five and up to ten pages down a search result. This way, the offender thinks they are doing you and your site harm, when actually new users visiting your site won't even notice them. Pretty sneaky, huh?

Of course there still lies the risk of someone actually taking the time to read all of the comments posted. However, the majority of users looking at a new product or service will only read the first several comments. Most people are impatient and want information as fast as they can get it. That is the beauty of the Internet: it has made us impatient.

You could take the more serious route and hire a lawyer to take legal action against your offender. But this will most likely cost time and money that you don't have. Spending hours and hours researching and developing a case could take months and months. Who has that kind of time?

Search engine reputation management is really the best way to go. It is relatively inexpensive and won't cost your hours upon hours working with, or paying a lawyer to develop a case against the offender, or slanderer. It is extremely important for brand managers to protect their name, even online.




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