Once you have embarked on getting your business on the Internet, the possibilities of growing it with a much smaller budget are huge. On the other hand, one of the most important aspects of having a clean and reputable online business is to watch out for reputation management.

When it comes to the online environment, there are hundreds of websites where you company could be damaged by unsatisfied customers or even by competition trying to ruin your reputation. Searching for negative reviews, articles or complaints should be done on a regular basis, but what are the top places where your online reputation can be hurt?

1.      Review websites

Probably the worst places for getting negative reviews. Review websites are extremely popular nowadays and hold a lot of authority in the search engines, thus ranking immediately for a term such as “company name review” or “company name problems”. A single negative review could make the potential customers choosing other companies that are selling the very same services but that in the same time have a clean reputation.

2.      Community forums

There are hundreds of niche forums available for each and anyone willing to share his experience with a certain company. Most of them have thousands of registered members and again, if 2-3 folks complain about your business your reputation will suffer a lot, thus reducing the numbers of potential clients.

3.      Personal blogs

Whether we are talking about a customer or someone that “heard a story about your company”, negative blog posts about your company could be a big reputation-destroyer. As there are many popular blogs out there with thousands of readers you should definitely watch out for co

Google has rolled out many changes lately, starting from big algorithm changes such as Panda to closing popular (or not) services such as Google Directory. The latest announcement is related to Google Places and the main things they have concentrated their efforts on are user reviews.

After getting into some disputes with Yelp not so long ago, Google folks decided to concentrate more on Google users reviews instead of those coming from 3^rd party websites, such as FreeIndex, Thomson Local and so on. With this change, we will no longer see review snippets from other websites on the Google Places page but they will be counted as reviews, no word about that.

It seems that with this change Google is trying to put more and more emphasis on reviews from Google users added directly to Google Places page (users-generated content anyone?); with 2 red “write a review” buttons, it is obvious that reviews added directly on the Places page are more than welcomed.

Other “pieces” that have been removed from Google Places pages are:

-          Citations and references – this is a big change while it was one of the best places for competitors to get important information about where a certain local business gets its review and strength

-          Snippets from reviews – not only that review snippets are gone but websites mentioning that very business have been moved at the bottom of Places page

More changes to come in the near future, according to Google folks, and things are about to be changing a lot when it comes to local search engine optimisation.

Years ago, directories were a great place for getting backlinks to a website (and some of them still are), but nowadays it seems that they are not playing such a great role in link building as before. Among the most authoritative directories you could find DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and Google Directory, but lately the guys at Google decided to no longer continue their “manually approved” directory.

Although Internet directories were back in the days when the www was just starting to increase in popularity a great place for finding information and websites, it seems that nowadays they are almost forgotten; when search engines deliver (almost) exactly what you are searching for, is there a need for directories?

Well, by looking at how popular local business directories have become yes, there is still a big demand for this type of resources, as well as for sub-niches ones. This was not the case with Google Directory thus it being shut down. In its place, Google folks have placed a statement:

“We believe that Web Search is the fastest way to find the information you need on the web.”

Furthermore, Google Labs is to be closed as well, according to Google SVP for Research and Systems Infrastructure Bill Coughran. He added that many “experiments” will be shut down while others will be incorporated into different areas. According to a late update on Bill’s post:

“To clarify: we don’t have any plans to change in-product experimentation channels like Gmail Labs or Maps Labs. We’ll continue to experiment with new features in each of our products.”

These latest products being shut down follow a large number of other services being closed such as Google Notebook, Google Video and so on.

Anytime Google updates PageRank thousands of webmasters joyfully open new threads claiming their websites got a higher PR, others sadly announce their PR was lowered and all in one, although PR has nothing to do with  rankings/traffic/earnings people are still loving it.

About three weeks ago the PageRank of millions of websites was updated, again forums were filled with new threads but two interesting things happened: Google’s PageRank went from 10 to 9 and Twitter’s went from 9 to 0! Each and every webmaster started asking questions regarding this and many of them saw this as an algorithmic error.

And it seems that all was a mistake as yesterday Google conducted yet another PageRank update, fixing both Twitter’s and its own PR. Yet again, Google has a PR10 and Twitter a PR9. Though you might be inclined to believe this update was only for fixing these 2 small problems, fact is that the newest PR update changed things when it comes to other thousands of websites as well.

Sites that went from PR1 to PR6 “regained” their previous PR, sites that went from PR4 to PR1 regained their PR and others kept their “positions” without any movement.

PageRank  lost its trust and “value” in the eyes of webmasters and SEOs but it is still a huge criteria on a huge market – the link selling market. It has been proven several times that high PR links (bought one) are not way better than industry-related ones from lower PR sites however many folks are still running for “high PR links”, as if they would be the Nirvana of link building.

Is this going to stop in the near future?

Yet another interesting study launched by HitWise related to search engines and social networks market share. Google has increased the search share in UK with about 1.50% when compared to May 2011, thus reaching a whopping 92% of all UK searches.

Maybe the most interesting part of this latest study is that with all the Google growth within search, the sources of traffic for most websites has declined, in terms of “sources from search engines” from around 40% to 34.29% in June 2011. Computers & Internet category holds the first position among all search categories, followed by Search Engines and Social Networking and Forums.

Although this could be seen as a decline in the search market, in fact it is not – this is a big sign that social media is getting higher and higher when it comes to sending traffic to a website. And indeed, according to HitWise, Facebook’s decline seems to have stopped in June – growing with a 0.11% last month and holding the first position in social networking visits from UK with 53.72% while YouTube is continuously growing its market share, reaching 20.76% in June – a 0.24% increase.

Social networking websites are far away from reaching search engines’ popularity however their constant growth is a sign that anyone serious about expanding an online business should keep a closer eye on everything that means social websites. Whether if we are talking about YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, these are soon to become some really big competitors for Google and also they can be a great source for traffic and sales.

According to Mashable, Google seems that it is going to re-brand two of its most popular products – Picasa and Blogger – from “non-Google name brands” to branded products. Exactly as they did in 2006 with JotSpot (re-branded as Google Sites) and in 2007 with GrandCentral (re-branded as Google Voice), it seems that these two popular websites are going to suffer a “face change” as well.

Mashable added that those will definitely not be discontinued while they enjoy a great online popularity but they will be renamed as “Google Photos” and “Google Blogs” (according to some of their reliable sources). Other services such as the giant YouTube are not going to “suffer” a re-brand.

Some time passed until Google thought about re-branding these two services, when compared to the above ones – Blogger was bought in 2003 and Picasa in 2004 – and we can only think that these new changes are strictly correlated with the Google+ wave. It seems that the re-branding will start in 4 to 6 weeks, somewhere around the long-awaited launch of Google+. If this is a smart move or not, only time will tell.

Blogger is one of the top 10 most visited websites from the world-wide-web and, if rumours are true, we will see the biggest re-branding in Google’s history. Some people will love it, other will hate it; however, as Picasa and Blogger are strictly related to “social buzz” they make the perfect target for Google’s social expansion.