Online reputation management - what is it?

For individuals rather than brands there's one more thing: Google has a results about you tool where you can ask for results showing your phone number, home address or email to be removed. It doesn't take down the page itself, just drops it from search. Anything genuinely defamatory is a legal matter, not an SEO one.

Managing what people find when they search your name or brand. Day to day it comes down to three things. Monitoring: alerts on the brand name, keeping an eye on the review sites that matter in your industry. Responding: replying to reviews, the bad ones especially, calmly and in public, because the next customer reads the reply more than the complaint. Building: filling page one with things you control, like your own site, social profiles, and press or directory listings, so one angry post is not the second result. What it should not mean is fake reviews or paying someone who promises to make negative content disappear. That tends to make a bigger story than the original problem.