Use Google to measure reputation

I’ve blogged before about how Google has come to replace corporate websites, at least for first time visitors who are searching for companies, products, people or services.

In fact, I believe a Google search is a good measure of your reputation on the Internet.

We’ve all most likely heard the example of the disgruntled blogger who titled his post, “What The F*@! is with Dell Technical Support?!” (That’s almost the title of the post.) For a period, this Google listing was ranked above Dell.com. Perhaps that’s because Google thought it was so amusing, or perhaps it’s because the post contained all the right keywords and was newer than content on Dell’s own site.

As I counsel clients, it’s about content and frequency. Today’s website is about a web presence — not just one site, but many sites that contribute to a company’s online presence. You can’t stop with your dot-com site and call it good. You’ve got to update your website content frequently, and do so on numerous sites.

This brings me to the point of this post: if you search in Google, you’ll get a good feel for what others are saying about you, your company, executives, products, services, etc.

The goal is for companies to contribute most of the content in the search results page. For this reason, the Google search engine should be treated much more like a reputation engine.