Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Eliminating/demoting A Negative Search Result Item

Posted by Anonymous on 2/25/2009 at 8:30 PM ET 250 Points
When a search is done using my company name, a very negative customer review and a forum question posted by someone with a legal issue are among the top 2-3 organic result listings. Is there an effective way to eliminate or at least deemphasize these negatives?
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by excellira on 2/25/2009 at 10:03 PM Accepted
    You will need to place keyword optimized content (PR, articles, etc) on sites which will rank higher than the negative listings in order to suppress them.

    Add two pages to the site that contains the negative comment/review and build links to them. Google will typically only list one or two pages per site within the SERPs and this may push the original page out.

    You can also create new web sites optimized for the keyword. Use separate hosting/IP and do not link to/from the main site. Creating new web pages on your main site may not be optimal since, again, Google tends to permit one to two listings per site for a given keyword.

    I could go on but space/time is limited.

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 2/25/2009 at 10:09 PM Member
    Instead of trying to bury the negative review, have you tried to convert the very unhappy customer(s) into fanatics based on your amazing customer service?
  • Posted by Annelies on 2/26/2009 at 7:59 AM Member
    Trinity SEM is right. This is how I did it: I made some free blogs and linked in these blogs to all positive news. All the positive news came before the negative comment and it went to the second page.
  • Posted on 2/26/2009 at 12:49 PM Author
    Thank you TrinitySEM, Jay Hamilton-Roth and Annelies for your responses. As you can probably tell I know almost nothing about SEM and thankfully it is not my primary responsibility. I plan to share TrinitySEM's plan with our online marketing guy because this response was exactly what I was looking for. I agree with Jay and had already recommended that we should also work with the disgruntled customer and see if we could make ammends.
  • Posted by SEM and Interactive on 2/28/2009 at 7:43 PM Member
    Hello,

    The responses above are all right. I been doing SEO for years and there is no magic formula. The key to taking down your negative SERPs is to make positive or ANY other page rank higher for the target keyword so that the negative page gets buried into the later SERPss pages.

    There are many methods to rank the SE result higher. It does not even have to be a blog, you can USE ANY page, video, social bookmark,etc - essentially any URL that shows in the new universal search results.

    The key is to create many pages that rank higher than your negative entry. NOTE: this might not be an easy task if the negative entry has a lot of juice (PR, relevancy, age), however most negative feedback pages are easily beaten unless there very popular and referenced. (from an SEO standpoint)

    Good Luck and feel free to ask me directly if you have any questions.
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