Q:  What should you do if you find a disparaging remark about you or your practice online?

This is important because many of your patients are savvy users of the internet and may look to see if they can find reviews about you or your practice.

If the remarks are not pervasiv (they are not found on multiple websites that are ranking well) you have a lot of options.  In essence, you are going to reverse SEO that page or SEO other results to outrank the disparaging comment.

First, let’s take a scenario:

Dr. Ben Richards has been running a successful physicians practice for 9 years.  One of his patients has a bad experience with Dr. Richards billing department.  The patient claims that they were overcharged and not properly reimbursed after the insurance provider was billed.  The patient logs into a health care review website and posts a disparaging comment about Dr. Ben Richards.  The result is ranking #3 in Google for the term ‘Dr. Ben Richards’ and #2 in Yahoo for the same term.  What should Dr. Richards do to protect his practice?

Here are some online reputation management tips to keep in your arsenal if your name is bringing up an unwanted search result:

1. Diplomacy

Contact the owner of the forum or message board and ask them to take down the defamatory remarks.  Explain your case nicely and many times they will remove it.  Review the terms of service on the forum to see if there are any caveats that could be used to bolster your case.

2.  Reverse Link Building

Links to the defamatory post are causing that post to rank well.  Find out who is linking to that page by logging onto Yahoo! and doing the following command:

link:defamatoryposturl

Contact the webmasters that are linking to the post and ask them to remove their links to the negative content.

3.  Take charge of your name online

If your name is common you may not have a problem but if it is uncommon the search results for your name may return some good, bad, and ugly.  Create profiles on strong reputable domain names including:

Digg.com

Amazon.com

Healthgrades.com

etc, etc

Find any place you can build a profile for your name on a strong domain.  These strong domains will eventually outrank the disparaging result.

4.  Build links to your profiles to ensure that they are indexed and taken seriously by the search engines.  Log onto places like Yahoo Answers and other forums.  Leave good, relevant responses (not SPAM) and drop a link back to your profiles.

In rare cases you can contact an attorney and bring a suit against the defamatory website but many times these suits backfire.

Do:  Monitor your online reputation and take action to protect your practice.

Don’t:  Assume that your online reputation is safe; the Internet is designed to share information and you mustn’t assume that all information is accurate and benign.