For years, Rip Off Report, Google, Complaints Board and various bloggers have been hiding behind the term “user generated content” and the idea that “it’s not our content, we just list it” to remain liability-free for false statements on their websites. The problem for me is that these companies are making a profit from said content. In Rip Off Report, for example, there are advertisements everywhere (often contextually-based from the company listed). In Google, there are sponsored results related to the company or person you typed in to get the content. In my opinion, the moment you are making money on content is the moment you should be liable for the content on your website.

Just because it’s not on printed paper does not mean websites shouldn’t be held responsible for their content. Newspapers and magazines, which have been sued successfully for many years if they publish false statements, are off the shelves and out of our minds within the day (if a newspaper) or a month (if a magazine). For all intensive purposes, the Web is permanent. News from six years ago can usually be found in a minute or so. In many cases, it is brought back from the dead years later and highly visible in search results for years to come.

The fact that website publishers like Rip Off Report are hiding behind free speech and “user generated content” is ridiculous. As I currently write the blog post you are reading I am making a profit at some level, and they do too, whether it is advertising, lead generation, or any other means. If they are making money, it is up to them to regulate statements or be liable for false ones.

A tough question for me to answer is if search engines like Google or Yahoo, which have massive influence on what hundreds of millions of people read each day, should be liable if they are posting untrue and damaging data? I understand the quick answer is “it would be impossible for them to weed this stuff out; they are dealing with billions of pages.” But in the same way it is making you tens of millions of dollars in revenue each day  at some level, so it seems like they should be liable if they are riddling consumers with false and slanderous content.

What makes everything worse is that 90% of the time, people are publishing this content anonymously or using fake/false identities. Maybe it is as simple as sites like Rip Off Report mandating proof of identity and not allowing anonymous or fake identities to publish opinions. If you have something to say about someone, and you believe it to be true, why give them a forum to hide? It just makes it too easy. People’s professional and personal lives are being ruined with no way to fight, respond or prove to the world otherwise. At the very least, the accused person should have the ability to prove it is untrue, confront the person writing about them and get the content removed if false. This can be done with a simply authorizing a persons credit card for $0.00 just to see if the name matches. They can do this, they choose not to.

I still think we are years away from this type of mass change to occur online, but it will happen one day, just as it did for the magazines and newspaper industries.

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Nothing helps credibility for your company more than when someone types in your name or company name into Google, and recent news about an award you won, a great promo you did, or a client you landed shows in the top search results. Everyone does research about you before doing business with you. When something great appears in the search engines about you, the deal is yours!

One of the big problems you will find is that most news worthy topics will drizzle down the listings, and soon enough, be so far buried in the search engine rankings that no one will ever see it again. It is the web’s version of todays paper turning into yesterdays, then last weeks, etc. and no one will ever see it again.

The good news about the digital version of the above scenarios is that if you employ good SEO tactics on each of the stories (essentially treating the news topic as its own SEO campaign) you can keep a good story (or 10) in the top of the search engine rankings. Below are 5 things you can do to an existing news topic to ensure it stays on top:

1. Comments – if there is a comment section in the story, use it! Search engines just want to see if there is some fresh data on the page from time to time.
2. Post about it – if you own a blog, or know anyone who does, write about the news topic every week and link to. You are essentially telling Google that this is still a noteworthy topic.
3. Re-submit it – Spend $80 at PRweb.com and re post the information as something new.
4. Make a video about it – Google has been keeping videos up for a much longer period that press releases. Make a quick video and post it into you tube. Google will like it!
5.  Digg it – go to digg.com, post the topic in there and get people to ‘Digg’ it. This may get the activity you need around the topic to get re-noticed by search engines.

Danny DeMichele is an SEO consultant, founder and CEO of eVisibility.com.

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I know I have not written a lot about reputation management in this blog, I am thinking about actually changing the direction of my blog toward this. I believe that this is going to be a continued huge problem over the coming years and we have a lot of insight on it. Anyways, I was recently published in Visibility Magazine with one of my articles on reputation management. Go check it out!

The Best Offense is Good Defensive Reputation Management by Danny DeMichele

Here are some pages that I promote to make sure I have the strongest reputation management campaign possible:

Danny DeMichele’s facebook

Danny DeMichele’s Crunch Base Account

Danny DeMichele dot net

Danny DeMichele’s Naymz Profile

A Danny DeMichele press release

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