Microsites are used in reputation work when the main corporate domain is not the right home for a specific narrative. Common applications: a dedicated site for a high-profile executive whose individual story matters separately from the corporate brand, a campaign site for a defining initiative, a response site addressing a specific contested topic, or a brand-within-the-brand for a business unit with independent visibility. The discipline: build on a clean, descriptive domain; mark up every content type with appropriate schema (Person, Organization, FAQPage, NewsArticle); link sameAs to the corporate canonical and to authoritative external profiles; treat the microsite as a long-term asset with sustained authoritative content. The failure mode is the throwaway microsite – thin content, no schema, no link discipline, deprecated after a year. Done correctly, microsites become page-one assets that reinforce the broader reputation picture.

The heat map is one of IMPACT’s most useful diagnostic views. For each tracked client, every priority keyword is plotted against every geography, with cell color indicating SERP composition – green where owned and friendly content dominates, red where negative content concentrates, yellow where the picture is mixed. The temporal layer adds week-over-week movement, so a deteriorating market shows up before it becomes a problem and an improving one validates the program’s interventions. The output is operational: the heat map tells the account team where to direct the next month’s effort. Geographic concentration of negative content often points to a single contested source that needs targeted work; keyword concentration points to a missing piece of authoritative content. Five Blocks clients see the heat map in monthly reporting alongside the underlying data.

Mugshot and arrest-record aggregators are one of the more frustrating reputation problems because the underlying records are public and the aggregators are commercial enterprises operating within the law. The response works at four layers. First, platform-specific takedown: most major aggregators have published removal processes, sometimes for a fee, often free for clear cases. Second, legal escalation where state laws apply – several US states have passed mugshot-pay-for-removal restrictions and other statutes that create takedown obligations. Third, source-level remediation when the underlying record has been sealed, expunged, or pardoned: the aggregator no longer has a basis for hosting it and platform policies typically support removal. Fourth, authoritative content displacement: a stronger owned property and earned media footprint pushes the aggregator results below page one over time. The combination usually produces material improvement within six to twelve months.