Reverse SEO – What You Should Know
Many website owners have experienced seeing their websites on the first few pages of search engine results but for the wrong reasons. Why reverse SEO? There are times when negative publicity can surface on the first few pages of the search engine results pages.This is very frustrating for the 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 in some cases. This negative publicity is often anonymous therefore difficult to track the source.
Aside from being easy to make anonymously, these negative and often times damaging publicity can be hard to control. This is compounded by the fact 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 lengths of making make-believe complaints just to give bad publicity to a person or company.
The maxim “good or bad publicity is still publicity” does not hold water all the time. On the online realm, reputatation 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 surface 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 – reverse SEO guide.
It is important to identify ALL 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 those keywords may contain your name or the name of your company. You should also run some analytics on these sites and pages to know their ranking authority. Doing this can help you determine the tools to use and the efforts to undertake in order to push them off the primary pages of the SERPs of popular search engines.
• Push It Down.
You need to push the web pages containing the bad publicity against your company down through the pages. Some effective tools 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 pages up through the SERPs. In so doing, you then lower the position and ranking of the bad publicity. A long and arduous task… yes and this a project best suited to a specialist SEO firm if you have the means in your budget.
• An Ounce Of Prevention Is Better Than A Pound Of Cure.
Bad publicity happens to almost everyone, regardless of 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 already ranked well by search engines, you’re one step ahead.
I hope this has been helpful.
Ray Baker
