In life there are few constants. In the world of online reputation and search engines, anything that could be defined as “constant” last approximately thirty minutes.

Because of the fact of constantly shifting technical issues, 19 out of 20 search engine professionals stopped making the statement they could guarantee certain results in a search engine. Since they factually cannot guarantee anything, they wisely decided to be truthful.

Unfortunately this problem is now creeping into the online reputation field, as more an more unwitting professionals lack the knowledge of what happened in the search engine industry five+ years ago. This morning I received a spammy canned e-mail from an online profile site that said

“promise yourself top placements in Google and make sure you are marketing yourself to the right audience“and “Guarantee your presence on Google’ first page.”

Ouch.

Warning. Run. If a company guarantees any search result, ask them how they guarantee that a monolithic corporate entity (AKA Google) is going to be manipulated by them.

Do yourself a big favor and take action on the dozens of expert articles written online about establishing your online profile and reputation (usually for free) and learn to have complete control over your professional brand online. You can also read this article on our CEO’s blog regarding being an “online reputation specialist” or our analyst blog “Social Media Expert – Defining Impossibilities“