A key step in determining how long your reputation management campaign will take is the strength of the website domain that your negative content appears on.
One way of measuring a website's strength is to look at the PageRank of it's domain. For a detailed explanation of PageRank, you can check out this page on Wikipedia.
In layman's terms, PageRank is measured on a scale of 0-10. Websites with a "PR" of 10 are the most popular - and usually the most difficult ones to push down in Google's search results.
Example You Can Try
To check the PageRank of a website that you want to push down, you can go to http://prchecker.info/ and input the domain where your negative content appears.
After you click, "Check PR", you'll be prompted to input a CAPTCHA and then your result will appear.
You can see that Jailbase.com, which is the source of many unfortunate public arrest records is a PageRank 3. We would consider this to be a moderately strong website. If you had a web page showing up for your name on the Jailbase site, we would reasonably expect it to be pushed down within 3-6 months.
Since sites usually get stronger over time, it may be more difficult to push down a listing on Jailbase if it becomes a PR4 or PR5. Certainly, the most difficult would be if your listing appeared on a PR10 website.
RipoffReport.com
If you own a business, you may have heard of ripoffreport.com (we're not going to link to them and make them stronger!). This site publishes consumer complaints about businesses. You don't want to wind up there because the site is a PR6, which means you'd probably be looking at 6-9 months, or possibly longer to push this listing off of page 1 of Google.
Our general rule of thumb is:
PR 0-3 takes about 3-6 months
PR 4-6 takes about 6-9 months
PR 7+ takes 9 months or more
Of course, this is only a rule of thumb and cannot be applied to all cases. Twitter, for example, has a PageRank of 10, but if there is a nasty tweet about you, these can usually be pushed down very quickly.
A news site may only maintain a PR or 5 or 6 and yet they will be MUCH harder to push off page 1 then a tweet about you or your business.
Learn more about how long reputation management takes or give us a call at 503-890-6663. We can usually give you an estimate within 24 hours.
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