What can you do when search results on your name are full of negative comments? Potential customers are increasingly checking for online references before they trust a website, company or person. Your own website is the most important factor, but directly after that people use search engines to see what other sites say about you. In this article I will give tips how you can cleanse your online reputation.
What can you do?
- Change the high ranking page so it becomes or seems more positive
- Change the high ranking page so it doesn’t rank well for your name anymore
- Have any reference to your name or the entire ranking page removed from the website
- Boost existing positive reviews to outrank the negative ones
- Promote the creation of new positive reviews to outrank the negative ones
Make a list of positive and negative reviews
Check at least the first two search result pages on your name, domain name, company name, product name and any other unique reference you can think of. When someone is looking for opinions, they might refine their search query when the first results don’t show any. Also check if there is any difference in the results across the mayor search engines. Ask the question: “Where would your potential customer look?” Make a list categorized by the things you can do to combat the negative ones or boost the positive ones.
Make the result more positive
Most of the time negative comments are placed on a public website so everybody can add another opinion. In these cases the most important features you should check are:
- Title
People scan titles in the search results. If those are negative, those results need to be removed or placed far below the top 20. Most of the time you cannot change the title of an existing review, you can just add your own comment. - Description
The description/snippet that appears in the search results is based on the section of text where the search term is abundant. If the description is negative, repeat your company name a few times (not too many) in a positive phrase. - Landing page above the fold and bottom
In review sites, the first and last reviews are viewed more frequently. If these are positive, the overall review seems more positive. If another negative review is added, you will need to add another positive one to counteract it. If you do all the fake reviewing yourself, make sure you use a proxy IP to pass any spam filtering.
Make the result less relevant
When you can add text to a review page you can also change the main topic. When the page doesn’t have your company name in the title, you might still have a chance of lowering its ranking by doing this. Add multiple reviews or comments that have little or nothing to do with your company name. When a review has few links pointing to it, you can also lower its ranking by directing totally irrelevant links to it.
Have the review removed
You can request the owner of the website to have the review removed. But when he doesn’t, you can add slight pressure. If your company or product name is trademarked, you can order the removal of each appearance of that word (by most laws). It is pretty hard to rank for something without having it in the content. The drawback of an ordered removal is the possible negative publicity you can get. Use this only when the review is crossing a certain decency line.
Boost positive reviews
It is very easy to boost existing positive reviews to outrank the negative ones. Because you are the authority on your own name, everything you link to gets more relevant. Select or create an internal page in your website that is optimized for your name. Then add a link to the positive review. If you own directories or moderate certain websites, you can also add a link from there to the review (Use your company name in the anchor text).
Promote positive reviewing
You can add a “customers about …” section to your website with links to reviews on your customers websites. This can be beneficial to both you and your satisfied customer. They get link points and maybe visitors and you show potential customers how satisfied your real customers are. The link you direct to the review boosts the ranking of that page and thus creates high ranking positive reviews on your name.
Don’t give in to the dark side
How tempting it may be, don’t use this to ruin the reputation of your competitor. You can help existing negative reviews score better, but don’t create fake reviews. When people find out, it will backfire on you.