photo credit: TankiJust a few days ago I have welcomed first guest blog post on Go Beyond MLS. I have been asking in private few of my colleagues bloggers to contribute to this blog at their spare time, but today I open my invitation to all my readers.

There are a few conflicting opinions about guest blogging in general. And it may not be something every one should consider. I will write about my stand on quest blogging at a later time. If you think you can benefit from a guest post on my blog please contact me through the contact form on About Page.

Every guest post on this blog will be formated in a similar way as was Wayne Harriman’s post. You are completely free to choose the subject of your post as long as it is related to real estate or real estate marketing. Ans yes, you are most welcomed to write about your listings and link to them from your guest posts.

The easy access to the internet and freely available publishing tools offer wonderful opportunity to just about any one to get your word out there, to establish your brand, to grow your business, to promote your charity and even find your love.

These same tools combined with anonymity can become a real nightmare. A lie aimed at destroying your reputation can quickly, some times in days, propel to the top of the search engines for your own name. It takes much longer to clean up the mess. In fact, the vicious postings on Yahoo! Answers that I was subjected to back in February are still cached by search engines even though Yahoo! Answers had deleted them long time ago. Although they no longer appear on the first page of results for my own name.

So what can you do to protect your name and your reputation. Depending on your involvement with the Internet and how much time you have, you can probably learn how to make more difficult for your enemies to carry out their some times most evil attacks on your reputation. Following are few things that I have been doing lately, that may help you as well.

1. Join online communities and if possible link to your profile from your websites and blogs. It might be difficult for you to do if you are not particularly involved with any online communities. But if you are a member of MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, StumbleUpon, Facebook or even if you use Twitter build up your profiles and link to your profiles from your own blogs and websites. With the time, these pages will rank well for your name making harder for faceless creeps to propel pages that can damage your reputation to the top of the search engines.
2. If you happened to have more than one websites or blogs consider including (if possible) your name in the “about” page. Again these will be the pages to beat should any one tries to use the internet to attack you.
3. Set Google Alerts for your own name. This will allow you to catch the unwanted staff early on, before it would begin to appear in top results on the search engines.
4. You might want to befriend a lawyer who understands the nature of the internet. Some times you will be able to remove unwanted material by writing the the websites administration. However there will be cases that your attorney’s help might be required.

Depending on your popularity or how much your enemy hates you, this can easily become almost a full time job. Unfortunately not every one has time to be engaged in the above described activities. In fact during past 6 months, I have fallen behind on many projects precisely because of reputation management activities. And let me tell you, it can be disheartening.

For the last few weeks I have been seriously contemplating to start using Reputation Defender. Below is the video from 20/20 about the case involving the death of Niki Catsouras and how the pictures of of the car crash had become a nightmare to Catsouras family. The Reputation Defender was involved in the case.

My question has nothing to do with any spoken language. In fact, I have never asked my attorney if he speaks Ukrainian. What I am referring to is whether or not your attorney understands issues surrounding Internet. Not only if he or she can tell apart a blog from an e-commerce website, but whether or not he truly understands the dynamics of this wonderful thing we call Internet. Will your attorney be able to tell you that viral wars is a huge waste of energy and time. Hopefully, your attorney will have a presence of mind not to call a “minion” your opponent or those supporting your opponent.

I have been fortunate enough to come to know three great attorneys in the recent weeks and month. So this post is my tribute to all of these outstanding individuals.

Karl Kronenberger of Kronenberger Burgoyne Internet Law Firm

Karl is representing me in the case brought against me by ePerks. Although I have been referred to Kronenberger Burgoyne by another attorney, I have seen their website on several occasions. The geek in my could not have been more pleased to find their website not only informative but also very well positioned in the search engines. To be completely honest, I would have never retained an attorney or a firm to represent or advise me on Internet relates issues if their website would be buried somewhere on the page 50 of the search results. I would not hesitate for a second to recommend Karl Kronenberger or his firm to my fellow bloggers. They can help you with the domain names, privacy terms, copyright and trademarks, and most likely anything in between. There are currently 6 attorneys at Kronenberger Burgoyne and they serve their clients out of San Francisco, CA.

Clarke Douglas Walton of Walton Law Firm

I have been referred to Mr. Walton by an affiliate marketer (Thank You Trisha Lynn!), who met Mr. Walton at one of the Affiliate Summits. Clarke was the one who referred me to Kronenberger Burgoyne. Walton Law Firm is located in Las Vegas, NV.

Joe Ferrara of Sellsius Real Estate Blog

Last but definitely not least Joe of Sellsius Real Estate Blog. They say that a picture speaks lauder than words. What a better picture there is that of Joe and Darren Rowse of ProBlogger to convey my point. No only Joe understands the language of bloggers, he is an avid blogger as well. If you have a chance to browse through his blog I highly recommend Joe’s posts on viral wars and his tips on how to prove your blog against lawsuits.

If you know of other good attorneys, please do not hesitate to share their websites in the comments below.

Also this post is not a legal advise nor should it be interpreted as such. Everything above is my own opinion.

I do. But I have not always been a huge fan Google Webmasters Tools. Yes I had a paranoia of “keeping things secret” from Google. However, lately I am not only rediscovering some useful things the tolls have to offer. I think I am becoming a fan.

One of the reasons for any webmaster to consider using Google Webmaster tools that it allows to submit sitemaps of your websites or blogs to “help” Google to discover the pages on your websites. Yes, it is not guaranteed that your pages will necessarily be indexed by Google, but when they are these tools can provide some very useful information.

For example today I have noticed that there are 57 pages on this blog that have “duplicate” meta descriptions. While I can not be certain how much effect this actually has on how well my blog ranks in the search results. I am assuming there may be some sort of penalty associated with those “dupes”.

It is very easy to find out if Google has issues with duplicate meta tags on your website. All you need is to log into your account and click on “Diagnostic” menu and then on “Content Analysis”. If Google has nothing to report under that menu I guess you can consider it a good news. In may case as shown in one of the screen shots above I have an issue with at leas 57 pages containing meta tags that similar or straight duplicate from other pages. If you are running a WordPress blog and an plugin that automates the process of creating metatags you may run into a similar problem. What is the solution? First you can probably block Google bot via robots.txt from indexing the duplicates, but I would not recommend doing so. Chances are those duplicate are result of category or archive pages on your website.

Many in SEO community think that meta tags do not offer benefits as far as Google is concerned. I have chosen to disable the plugin that is responsible for generating meta tags. If anything, I would rather suffer a duplicate content penalties based on the content of the pages rather than on meta tags.

The bottom line is that there are many benefits from using Google Webmasters Tools, and if you have not done it before give the a try now. If your platform is WordPress I highly recommend Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress- this plugin creates sitemaps for your blog that you can not only through Google Webmasters Tools but also through a similar services in Yahoo! and MSN.

No matter how hard I want the ePerks issue to go away, it just doesn’t. It looks like I am faced with bunch of imbeciles trying to to fight dirty. So since the fight they want the fight they get. I have been contemplating to make video posts on this blog for quiet some time. I am sure few of you are looking forward to put a face behind this Vlad, so stay tuned.