A lot of website owners have experienced seeing their websites on the first few pages of search engine results but for the wrong reasons. There are times when negative publicity would surface on the first few pages of the search engine results and this is frustrating for individuals or companies concerned. Negative write-ups or comments in blog posts, websites, and forum threads can pop up in the first few pages, even page one, of search results for certain keywords. This negative publicity is often anonymous so it is difficult to track down the source.
Aside from being easy to make anonymously, this negative and oftentimes damaging publicity is hard to control. This can be compounded by the fact that the growing popularity of social networking sites has made it even easier for just anybody with even the mildest grievance to give weight to their complaints. Some even go to the lengths of making make-believe complaints just to give bad publicity to a person or to a company.
The maxim “good or bad publicity is still publicity” does not hold water all the time. On the online realm, reputability and reliability are important factors not only for search engines but also for many netizens. Moreover, bad publicity online can spread more quickly and easily especially if the web pages featuring the damaging write-up surfaces on the first few pages of the search results. A mere rumor can badly damage a company’s reputation and credibility.
People and companies who experience bad press can resort to an online reputation management strategy called reverse SEO. The reverse SEO technique aims to remove unwanted or negative information about a company or individual and to lower its search ranking. By pushing bad publicity from the front page of the search engine results page, reverse SEO can lower its exposure and can help cut down the potential impact on the beleaguered company.
Determine The Extent Of The Problem
It is important to identify the websites and web pages that contain the negative publicity. You also need to determine the keywords being used that are ranking high in the search engine results pages. Remember that those keywords may contain your name or the name of your company. You also should run some analytics on these sites and pages to know their ranking authority. Doing all these can help you determine the kind of tools to use and the efforts to undertake in order to push them off from first pages of the SERPs of popular search engines.
Push It Down
You need to push down the position and ranking of the web pages containing the bad publicity against your company. You can do this by gathering the necessary tools and executing your reverse SEO campaign. Some effective tools that you can use are optimized press releases, a social bookmarking program, social medial profiles, and a network of competing blogs and sites. An effected reverse SEO campaign may also include building high quality links through content syndication. In short, you need to target the online realm with relevant, fresh, keyword rich, and high quality content that has the potential to propel to the top ranks in searches. In so doing, you can lower the position and ranking of the bad publicity.
An Ounce Of Prevention Is Better Than A Pound Of Cure
It is very rare that a company will not any experience any blemish in its reputation. Bad publicity happens to almost everyone, regardless if whether the complaints or claims are legitimate or not. For many SEO and online reputation management professionals, it is best to launch a reverse SEO campaign even before the bad publicity affecting your company shows up in the search engine results. In short, it is better to continually and regularly provide enough high quality content so that the search engine spiders will pick them up and rank them favorably. If you have many of your web pages ranked well by search engines, you can keep the bad publicity stuff from the first few pages of search results.
Hope this helps you if you have suffered this scenario.
Ray Baker