Carolyn Capalbo, a well-known REALTOR in Northern Virginia, has experienced exactly this problem. In short, Carolyn Capalbo is also the name of Ashley Dupre’s mother (you know, the call girl that was involved in the sex scandal with Eliot Spitzer). So, what does Carolyn Capalbo the REALTOR do when people begin Googling her name and coming up with sex scandals, prostitution and photos of women clad in skimpy bikinis?

To save her reputation, and to allow people to know that there is another Carolyn Capalbo, the REALTOR Carolyn Capalbo began using the power of the Internet to manage her online reputation.

If you want to begin managing your online reputation, and you simply want your name back, then it pays to utilize SEO to achieve your goals:

1. If you want to find out what Google knows about your name, sign up for Google Alerts. This service, provided for free through Google, essentially lets you know the moment your name appears in Google’s index. From new stories to blogs and videos, if your name appears Google will track it down and let you know about it. This is a great starting place for examining your online reputation.
2. Once you’ve begun monitoring Google for your name, you may begin to see a trend of inaccuracies or incomplete statements or, in the case of Carolyn Capalbo, another person in the news with your name!
3. Start a blog to get your message out there. A blog is quite simple to set up and is often the most effective means for getting your message out there in cyberspace. If you keep your blog updated and keep your messages current then you will have a better chance of ranking high in the search results. A great way to combat inaccuracies or other persons with your name is to simply keep yourself at the top of the search results; and there’s no better way to achieve this than through an updated blog.
4. Utilize the many social media sties to participate in the online community. From You Tube to Twitter and Facebook, social media sites feature results when you perform a web search. In addition, many of these popular media sites are popular among the bigger search engines, thereby allowing you to accomplish higher search engine rankings. Be sure, however, to use the proper keywords to enjoy better rankings.

In order to help us protect our reputation, today we can find many Reputation Management companies. How do these reputation management companies operate? Most of the companies offer pretty basic services; they try to find your online reputation status using your name and your website domain name. If there are negative reviews that are associated with your name or with your website, the reputation management companies try to minimize the effects of the negative reviews and feedbacks by using positive feedbacks across the internet and thus trying to project you as a reliable service provider. However, this is not good enough. Before hiring your reputation management company, you must make sure to understand their services. You should find out whether they will actively engage in getting your negative reviews removed from the review sites.

Interestingly, it is our normal tendency to take on to negative feedback more than the positive ones. It can be your competitor who can be posting such reviews or one of your customers who feels that he has not received a satisfactory service from you can be posting such damaging reviews. Most of the reviews are of revengeful in nature. Unfortunately, such customers will not stop with posting their negative reviews in a single website. They will try to create maximum damage by posting in multiple websites. When people search for your services or your name, they might find all these negative reviews lined up one after another in the search results. People often will not take the trouble to find out who has posted the feedback so they will think that all of them are from different people and they disqualify you straightaway.

You need to be highly cautious about your online reputation so that you achieve your business objectives without too much of a struggle. Therefore, hiring a reputation management company would certainly be a useful investment considering the amount of money that it will bring to your company in the form of new business.

If you want to keep track of your online reputation, you can also make use of Google alerts. You can set alerts for your name and for your domain name. Whenever Google picks up something relating to your name or domain name, you will receive an alert and this will help you in acting quickly. The longer you delay to act the greater the damage. So making use of such online tools and reputation management companies will help you manage your online reputation and combat effectively the revengeful reviews