Checking Your Own Reputation Online

I was fortunate enough to get a glimpse of the Page Quality Review Manual for Google employees. It was published on March 31, 2014 so the information in it was quite relevant.

Some of the initial surprises for me first began with realizing that people are still reading/researching websites and scoring them. Learning the different factors they’re looking at and how they can affect your rankings was enlightening and definitely worth sharing.

One of the first things the people applying Page Quality (or PQ) scores to pages learn is checking the online reputation of the site/pages they’re looking at.

How To Check Online Reputation

1. Identify the homepage of the site you’re checking.

2. Run some searches in Google: (omit the quotes when trying these)

     
  • “sitesbyjoe -site:sitesbyjoe.com” - this will search for “sitesbyjoe” and exclude any pages on sitesbyjoe.com
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  • “sitesbyjoe reviews -site:sitesbyjoe.com” - this will search for reviews of “sitesbyjoe” excluding any results on sitesbyjoe.com.

You’ll want to replace “sitesbyjoe” with your own web address of course.  You can further expand on these examples by searching your full domain name, your own name, etc. You can also replace “reviews” with “complaints”, “discussions” etc to find different results.

3. Review the findings.

I discovered that many, many sites still had my Rio Grande, NJ address and phone number. I haven’t been in Rio Grande since 2009.  Obviously that needs to be fixed asap.

Some of the sites that will come up will be technical reviews. I myself saw that I have no custom 404 page (among other items) but things like this can be easily fixed and each thing you fix is a tiny towards achieving a more solid online reputation.

These researchers are even looking at your BBB listing (if you have one) and checking Wikipedia for entries as well!

 In the end, it all comes down to the same thing. Search Engine rankings and good original content go hand in hand.


About Joseph R. B. Taylor

Joseph R. B. Taylor is a humble designer/developer who makes stuff for screens of all shapes and sizes. He is currently the lead UI/UX Architect at MScience, LLC, where he works to create simple experiences on top of large rich datasets for their customers and clients.