In case you haven't heard there was a hack of the infamous Ashley Madison website that exposed personal details for over 30 million accounts. Many of those accounts are probably fake and were created by curiosity seekers. But what if someone created a fake account using your name? Or let's be incredibly optimistic and some of those accounts were single people looking for other singles. Right now your name is popping up on many sites that are republishing this stolen data and associating your name with an infamous website. This is a great opportunity to revisit SEO reputation management.
Step #1 - Stay Clean. It is easier and cheaper in business not to need reputation management so try to make changes to avoid any future activity that might need to be cleaned up later.
Step #2 - If someone is republishing stolen or copyrighted data (it could be your credit card details, your web content, internal emails, etc) You can legally request that the website owner and/or hosting company that the website owner is using immediately remove it.
Step #3 - You can file a DMCA request with Google to remove the website from the search results.
Step #4 - Build up a positive image for your company or personal name. It can be hard to get rid of all negative mentions from the web but you can make the negative mentions less noticeable by flooding the web with positive mentions. Build up strong profiles on social sites, personal blogs and other free publishing sites. Very few people look at the second page of Google results. By building up the blogs and social sites you can get the first 10 results in Google to be positive.
Step #5 - Monitor for new mentions by setting up a Google Alert or select a paid service to monitor the search results.
Step #6 - If you are in Europe, look into the "Right to be forgotten" option with Google. Does not apply to US.
Step #7 - Probably want to skip SEO sabotage. Unless you are an expert your attempt at SEO sabotage can backfire and make the negative site rank even higher in the search engines.
I'm running out of time, so feel free to add to this list of SEO reputation management tips for complete newbies.
