Category: Business Reputation Management

You want to get rid of bad press online quickly!

A business owner’s worst fear is discovering that his or her company has a negative search result connected with it. All of your efforts to ensure your clients are happy with your product or service may be tossed out the window as a result of one rating that made its way up to the top of your advertised Search Engine Results Page (aka SERP).

If you see a negative review, slanderous comments, or other negative information at the top of your brand search results, you might immediately want to get it removed, right?

Thankfully, there are a few methods and solutions available, often used by businesses in the ORM (Online Reputation Management) field, to delete unwanted results from Search and make defamatory content disappear.

There are two approaches to this problem:

• Getting rid of the undesirable result completely
• or suppressing the unwanted result

Let’s discuss both:

1. Removal

There is a fine line between deleting content over which you have control and removing content over which you have no control. Let us begin with the former:

• Removing Content from Web Pages that You Own/Control:

This may be essential if you’ve noticed that you have pages that are no longer relevant for a variety of reasons, such as old items or teammates, tour opportunities you no longer sell, or pages that are actually creating redundant material on your web.

The majority of website owners usually delete unpublish unwanted content. They most probably do this thing because they do not know any better. The issue with completely deleting pages from your website is that, since the pages have already been created on the internet, they are likely to be connected with other pages on your own website as well as external links on other websites (such as social media mentions, shares,  bookmarks, or even plain old linkage).

If you delete some content, Google (and other crawl bots) automatically mark the page as incomplete, which may hurt your Seo rankings and overall ratings.

There are three options for dealing with this problem:

• Remove pages that use the Google Remove URLs Feature in your Search Console account;
• exempt pages from crawling using your Robots.txt file (if you’re using WordPress, Yoast SEO is a great tool for this).
• Use the “noindex meta tag” to show that the page must not be indexed (this approach is not as stable as the 2 techniques above and can be a little complicated if you don’t know your way about coding).

By using one of the three solutions mentioned above, you can ensure that you clean up after yourself and never leave a blank page.

• Removing Content from Websites You Don’t Own/control

A bad search result will almost always appear on a website that you do not own. Someone could post a negative personal experience with your service, a negative social media review, and so on.

Since you do not own such websites, you will need assistance in removing the harmful content. It’s not easy, but it can be handled in certain situations. There are two approaches to this:

1. Contact the website’s owner.

Simply put Reach out to them and inquire them directly (but politely). For example, you might request that a blogger delete a negative article. If you can justify why they should delete it or how you can boost their experience of your brand or product, they can rethink their opinion of your business and even transform a negative review into a favourable one.

Remember, negative reviews don’t equal bad business; they generate buzz and, if done correctly, can also help potential customers make purchasing decisions by demonstrating that you care for your customer’s complaints.

2. Make contact with Google

Google provides website owners with many options for removing inaccurate, personal, negative, or outdated information from their search results.

Publishing confidential personal or financial records, for example, is against Google policy. Something that may be used to commit theft is prohibited. Offensive photographs or videos are also prohibited. If you come across any derogatory material that contradicts any of these rules, please email Google and request that it be removed. Keep in mind that the website will still exist; it will only be excluded from Google search results.

If the material you want to delete is actually outdated or the website no longer works, simply use the Remove out-dated content feature. Google is very specific on how and when to use this feature, so just use it if the result snippet or saved (stored) result in SERPs differs from the main tab.

2. Suppression

• Reverse SEO can be used to suppress negative content.

Reverse SEO, also known as search engine suppression, is a technique used in the ORM industry to minimize the reputational harm caused by unfavourable content.

Reverse SEO, like SEO, employs a series of tools to block negative results on Google Search as well as other search engines, allowing the positive sites to shift over the negative ones so no one checking the name of your business sees the negative information.

This is the foundation of how ORM professionals reduce the effects of negative content about your brand. It’s akin to battling fire with fire. Instead of removing material, you build more in order to bury the bad content in search results.

In certain cases, Reverse SEO not only removes misleading content from the first few pages of search results, but it also helps to improve your web identity and promote your company in a positive light.

The majority of searchers can only click on the first few links on SERPs. When you build SEO-friendly content, your page will climb to the top of the search results, while other pages will fall.

If you can get the negative material pushed to the third or fourth tab, users are unlikely to see it.

• Suppressing the Negative Links

There are different methods for burying bad links, all of which are simple and effective:

• Create a business blog and publish high-quality content on a daily basis.
• Optimize existing web content, such as pages on the business website.
• Create high-quality content and connect to and from authority sites that are topically related to the web pages you’re promoting.
• Create social media accounts and ensure that you are active in all of them (handle negative reviews to show proper customer care).
• Other forms of communication, such as animations, photographs, and podcasts, should be published and promoted.
• Leave helpful or constructive feedback on other influential websites in your field.
• By publishing expert advice in technical forums, you will establish yourself as a thinking leader.

Suppressing negative content is similar to conventional SEO this fresh content can be optimized to outrank the negative results. The more kinds of content you produce, and the higher the quality, the more likely it is to rate above the bad content, making it less apparent.

• Conclusion

Don’t be distressed if you come across negative content about your business. Use that negative energy to devise a plan to make the information vanish, either by having it deleted or dragging it to the bottom of search results.