Estimates show that around 90% of consumers use search engines to find websites. When they undertake a search for your company name or brand, your hope is that your own website is high up on the list. However, you do not have control over what people write about your company or brand on other websites and in forums, blogs, and articles. The search engine results page is the digital front page for your company. Be aware that the good and the bad search engine listings are visible to your potential clients and affect reputation and buying decisions. This has a powerful influence on your company and brand reputation.
What can you do if negative information relating to your company appears in the search results You may want to consider Search Engine Reputation Management.
Search engine reputation management combines reputation management with search engine optimization. Think of it as a mix of PR with technical skills. High rankings of the good publicity is the goal, which will in turn push bad publicity down the list and out of consumers view. Consumers rarely view more than two pages of search engine results for any search.
Companies produce a large amount of compelling written content such as press releases, articles, testimonials, case studies, white papers, etc. Often, this information is not published on a companys website nor optimized in a search friendly way. Therefore it is not indexed or listed by the search engines.
The goal of search engine reputation management is high rankings and indexing in the search engines for all corporate communications and press releases. The result is an increase in your overall web presence which will knock negative listings from the top spots of the search engine rankings.
You work hard to build a reputation for yourself and for your clients. Search engine reputation management enables you to protect and manage these reputations by being actively involved in the results of search engines.
Copyright James Peggie
James Peggie is the Director of Marketing for Elixir Systems a search engine marketing agency located in Scottsdale, Arizona. Their website is located at and their blog is
ahoo got more pages indexed than Google. And an enormous amount more. It seems that the Yahoo index is more than twice the size of the Google index. Recently this was also announced by Yahoo, even though they generally dont comment on index sizes.
However, a simple search for the word the in both engines shows a huge difference. Where Google comes up with approx. 3,320,000,000 results, Yahoo spits out the huge amount of 10,200,000,000 results.
Ungoogle like, a couple of weeks later Google responded. Not by word, but in silence. An enormous crawl of the net was performed and even though it still says Searching 8,168,684,336 web pages on the google home page, it is obvious that they have indexed a lot more pages.
These new pages actually were ignored by Google before but it seems that the spider rules of google have been changed in order to increase the index. Obviously this could not happen unnoticed. And noticing it we did. Many sites are seeing reduced traffic since Friday, August 19th, 2005.
Considering that Google has special rules for newly indexed pages, (Simply said: no PR so PR is not taken into account when determining the position of the page*) you can see lots of PR0 pages rank high that werent there before. Some of the sites I monitor show a decrease in traffic of about 20 to 30%. If Google indexed about 20 to 30% more pages then this explains the decrease in traffic. These new pages get found, but the number of searches has not increased. In other words, the amount of traffic Google generates now is spread over 20 to 30% more pages. High ranking sites lose traffic (especially content rich sites) to all these new pages that have been indexed. In a next PR update this lost traffic should be recovered partly I believe, though all these new pages also contain new links so it is a swag (Silly Wild Ass Guess) to predict what will happen in the next PR update.
It is interesting to see how Google now made the fairly commercial decision to respond to Yahoos increased index. A leader sometimes needs to punch a challenger in the face in order to maintain the respect of the group. They did this, though for now it seems to be just a small punch, which makes me believe we can expect more from Google.
*Controversial, not generally accepted, theory of mine.
Peter Faber is an SEO Consultant and works for TextLinkBrokers. This article may be published only with working links to and