It might be surprising that companies, organizations, and cities are buying up domain names ending with .xxx. The new porn-related domain address is causing waves because if Jim Smith doesn’t buy it, then some porn company hoping to exploit his name will.

To avoid any indecent Internet exposure, some of the city’s biggest institutions are snapping up corresponding domain names ending in “.xxx” to make sure they are never bought by or associated with adult entertainment websites.Mary Rodgers, who works in marketing and communications at the city, said the IT department had just purchased www.citywindsor.xxx on Tuesday.

“It’s to protect our reputation,” Rodgers said. “We’re not going to use it, but we own it.”

This makes a great deal of sense. It will help the City of Windsor to protect its online reputation.

Protecting your online reputation is not easy in any regard–it requires attention to detail and a lot of work. Unfortunately, the effect of anonymity on the Internet is that people can be ruthless and cruel.

Removing The Offending Material
This is why the services of a company that can quickly remove negative comments about your organization from the top pages of search engines must be employed as soon as possible. As already mentioned, high quality, informative SEO writing and digital content is the best way to remove comments that could damage your company’s reputation. You need an organization that can issue press releases, write fresh articles and blog posts, create social awareness and post videos onto sites like YouTube. An all-out SEO assault will help you quickly regain your favorable reputation.

The solution is not SEO per-se, but online reputation management specialists.

It is fairly easy to tell if you need help from an online reputation management association because of social media or web reputation issues. This article gives a pretty good outline of how to spot the problem:

If a Google search of your name instantly pulls up photos of keg stands or a blog post you wrote about your wild Spring Break during your junior year, it’s safe to say that your professional image is less than stellar. But you already knew that, right? (We hope you did. If not, you might want to open a new tab and head over to Google to get started on your personal damage control.)

As unpleasant as it may seem, it’s undeniable that the Internet is a great place for finding scandalous or even slightly unflattering information about people. If you’ve spun even the slightest thread on the World Wide Web, your career and reputation can be significantly affected by what you’ve shared.

The Internet matters. Your on the web reputation is just as important as your off the web reputation and they actually have a major effect on each other whether you want them to or not.

There are a host of websites on the Internet that claim to give users free websites for nothing. Lots of them are even telling the truth. But few of them really deliver any sort of quality product–and for free, how can the customer really complain? However, finding a site that will not just give you a free website, but make sure it’s high quality, that is a tough thing to do.

Jimdo is a site that is both free and high quality. You can create your own domain and website at Jimdo. Essentially, you are creating a subdomain that can be found at BlahBlah.Jimdo.com. If, for example, I’m a soccer enthusiast, I might put “SoccerFan.Jimdo.com” as my URL. I do, in fact, have my own website, but it is a subdomain of Jimdo.

For people who are out to use their website for online reputation management services reasons, this is perfect. Google reputation management is a big reason why services like this even exist. People want to make sure theirname.jimdo.com is taken by them, instead of some anonymous Internet malcontent who wants to do their online reputation harm.

Celebrities know that when they became famous, they became the subject of much public attention. This is just a fact of life, unfortunately, for these people. Celebrities are under public scrutiny at basically all times–nowhere is that scrutiny more narrow or abusive than online. On the Internet, the famous or even semi-famous can easily find that they are the subject to ridicule.

According to powerful public relations figure Lord Bell, stars that have their reputations trashed online must be careful not to overreact. “I think it was the chief executive of Google who said there were a billion blogs and they have an average readership of one.

This is certainly true. There are countless blogs on the web which are really more like personal diaries. People may occasionally stumble upon them, but for the most part it is simply a small piece of the web that will only ever be seen by its author. Google reputation management still has to take these thousands of blogs into account, though,  because they can be quite damaging to an online reputation if used correctly.

Most free profile, website, or blog resources are pretty cheaply done. They are not looking to make millions off of subscriptions, and they are therefore usually fly-by-night operations with little quality to them. Not so for Wix. This is a resource that virtually everyone with an online reputation ought to know about. The tool allows individuals to create high quality websites for absolutely no charge–like a free gift online.

Wix is a small, but growing more popular, startup that is based on creating free flash-based websites. The company was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Tel Aviv and New York City. To date, over 8.7 million websites have been created through Wix.

Wix is a great tool for anyone who has a reputation management problem. Being able to create very attractive websites, and for free, is a wonderful resource for someone who wants to heal their reputation.

Connections is the entire reason people got into social networking. With that said, some people use social networking profiles for online reputation management services. To me, that is the usefulness of Communities.com.

Communities.com is an international online community where people from all over the world (185 countries) meet, chat, flirt and interact every day. There are loads of things to do and it’s free to join!

The site allows you to set up profiles for free, integrate your profile into your larger social networking existence, and customize that profile as you see fit. Best of all, Communities.com is what you want it to be. What I mean by that is that it is not inherently invasive, though certainly if you would like it to mirror the personal-ness of a site like Facebook.

Communities.com is a great website for those looking for other social networking options.

There are many social networks around these days, including Twitter, Myspace, and Facebook–to name just a few of the most popular. So, whats the most popular social network you’ve never heard of? It might be Tagged–a social network with 30 million estimated monthly unique visitors. This means it’s less popular than Ning or LinkedIn, but still extremely popular.

Tagged is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and has over 100 million registered members. Founded in 2004, the company now has forty employees. The site is very popular amongst older age brackets and has a high rate of overlap with Facebook membership, according to studies by Tagged itself.

Internet reputation management is not an easy thing, but it can be made more easy by controlling social networking profiles more exactly.

Postess.com is a social networking-style website for professionals. Like LinkedIn or Naymz, Postess is used for business connections and professionalism, but it can also be quite fun, quite important. Their motto is “Think. Look. be Professional”. The idea is that employers could be directed towards your Postess profile, rather than other social networking profiles that might be more damaging–like Myspace or Facebook.

Postess.com was developed and launched publicly on October 1st of 2006. The launch of Postess.com was a hard and long journey, as Postess Owner had to decide on what types of information on a profile would help make employers see you more professionally. Postess Owner turned to a Human Resource department for a good idea of what information employers would like to know, and then assembled those questions and added them to Postess.com.

Postess is not the most popular business profile site on the web–obviously there are some others that clearly outrank it. It is also not the flashiest–not having the millions from angel investment to hire crack programmers, but what Postess does offer is another profile for free, that is designed to be presentable and professional. This is great for Internet reputation management purposes.

Social networking is not just a fad–it is a trend on the Internet that is not going away anytime soon. Hundreds of millions of people all across the world have signed up on many social networking sites and use them on a daily basis for all kinds of activities. Social networking isn’t just a hobby anymore, it is almost required for many jobs and many jobs are now based around organizing social media.

Fotki is a strange name to be sure, but it’s a pretty successful social networking site. It’s available in over fifteen languages and claims to have over 1.6 million registered users. Those users range from over 240 countries and the website itself hosts over a billion images. Fotki is a visually based social networking site–it’s popular amongst people who want to share videos and photos, mostly. It was founded in 1998 by Dmitri Don, and has waxed and waned in popularity since then, but has experienced steady growth over that time.