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.