You have spent months, even years building your reputation as a business. Why let it get spoiled by a resourceful blogger? I have shown that this can happen when I blogged on The Parental Olympian about the disaster that was the Olympic Cabinet Company and their botched customer service effort when building my kitchen. Within one day I skyrocketed to the top of Google searches (I have now fallen from the ranks) for Olympic Cabinets. But how can you stop this from happening? Easy. Build your own corporate blog.It is important to note that many people will form their opinion of you or your business based upon the sites found with information about you. So solidifying your reputation online should be a major priority for your business. Rob Sullivan of the Search Engine Journal talks about this phenomenon in depth:

An upset former customer can do a whole lot more damage to your reputation online that you may suspect. If they are a popular blogger, for example, and are able to call on their network of sites to help promote their negative view of you, it can have a detrimental impact on your search rankings.This is because they can use a tactic called link bombing to rank higher than you for your name or the name of your company.What do you mean links can be bad?Just like how you need to build links to improve your link popularity and ultimately search engine rankings, links from other sites can work against you.That is the real power of blogging – the ability to quickly build links back to your site on virtually any phrase you chose to target.

Start blogging now. Today is as good a time as any to start managing your online reputation because tomorrow may be too late.

Technorati Tags: Blog Linking and Search Engine Optimization

Scott Goldblatt also writes daily at his personal blog The Parental Olympian