Reputation management is something of a buzzword in the internet marketing and search engine optimization worlds at the moment, and of course, no business wants negative reviews or bad press to show up at the top of the SERPs.  However, some elements of reputation management are also controversial - after all, some companies do deserve the bad reviews they are getting, and more importantly, consumers deserve to be aware of them as well.

First of all, hat tip to Kimberly Bock at Learning SEO Basics for bringing the idea that consumer rights are being violated by marketing companies to our SEO company’s attention.  Of course, this issue is not strictly black and white, because sometimes bad things do happen to good companies.  On the other hand, there are plenty of unethical marketers who either protect equally unethical businesses, as well as marketers and SEOs who use the consumer review sites to attack their competitors.  And there is always the risk of disgruntled former employees or other risk factors that apply to both squeaky clean and slightly shady SEO clients.

The issue here is that consumers should be able to read both negative and positive reviews and decide for themselves whether or purchase an item or patronize a business, not whether or not the business has hired an SEO company to manipulate the search results.

However (and this is a major “however), negative items can pop up in the SERPs for even the most ethical companies.  Obviously, prevention - don’t be evil - is key, but sometimes ex-employees or competitors can post bad reviews or worse.  This is where a good SEO company or internet marketing company comes in, because they can help make positive reviews more prominent (of course, make sure you hire a white hat company known for their ethics - you don’t want to dig yourself deeper in the karmic hole, and having a firm that use black hat techniques to sink the negative reviews in the SERPs may come back to haunt you in the end).

Last but not least, it is important to remember that negative reviews can have a hidden positive.  Having a less-than-stellar review appear on a site like Yelp can prove that your reviews are real, not made up by a marketing company or posted by your friends and family.  It lends a certain degree of authenticity.  And besides, most consumers are intelligent and they know that if a business has lots of customers, chances are not all of them are going to be perfectly happy.

Just be sure to respond to any negative reviews in a reasonable manner, because using inflammatory language and attacking the poster is only going to make you look unreasonable and unprofessional - it will make matters much worse - and move on with things (although if you are receiving a particularly large amount of complaints about a given topic, you need to address that, of course).