Taking control of your Google SideWiki - Online Reputation Management

This tutorial will show you how to gain more control over your Google SideWiki feed. Google SideWiki is a new ‘search community’ logged in Google users to review your website and products in the SideWiki panel. These reviews are then displayed to other Google account users. The result is an active discussion for your website which will displayed to all logged in Google users with the toolbar.

This poses a number of questions. For example, what is to stop your competitors from making negative comments on your SideWiki? Over the next few weeks we are going to look at strategies for online reputation management using Google SideWiki - for now we are going to show you how to take control of your SideWiki and add a custom welcome message.

The first step is to install the latest copy of the Google Toolbar. You will also need to be logged into your Google Account (you can create one here).

Once you have done this, you will find a new icon of a pencil in a speech bubble (highlighted below) which activates the Google SideWiki panel. You will also want to turn on the Google Toolbar spell-check extension (i.e. the ABC icon). Once you have activated SideWiki, you should see a panel like the one below.

Because I’m logged in as the verified site owner, I also see a panel which says ‘As the site owner, you can write a special entry that will remain the top entry for this page’. This is because I have verified www.demonzmedia.com against my Google account. To do this for your website, login to your Google Account and verify your domain:

Verification works off the email addresses that are linked to your account, so you must add an email account which ends in the domain name you’re trying to verify. To do this, login and add a new email address to your Google Account.

Once you have verified your email address, you should then have control of the Google SideWiki ‘Page Owner’ entry and can add your welcome message (see below):

I hope this tutorial has been useful, and I would love to hear your comments on Google SideWiki.