How to Get Rid of Search Results You Don’t Like
As a business owner, there’s nothing worse than discovering your business has a bad search result associated with it. You work hard to ensure your customers are satisfied with your products and service. You work even harder to make your business a success. Unfortunately, they’re common in business transaction and interactions. We’re in the age of information, and people are eager to share their opinions online. Sometimes, these opinions are not positive.
Fortunately, there are a handful of techniques and strategies, used primarily by companies in the online reputation management industry, to make negative content vanish. Similar to SEO (search engine optimization), which uses strategies to make your business more noticeable on web search engines like Google, Reverse SEO uses a variety of techniques to make a particular site less noticeable. This is the backbone of how ORM (online reputation management) experts mitigate the impact of negative content about your brand.
Essentially, there are two ways of doing this: removal and suppression.
Removing Negative Content Completely
If you notice a bad review, defamatory remarks, or other negative content showing up at the top of search results when you search for your name, your first instinct might be to try and have it removed. Removing a link from the internet permanently disassociates it with your name, and it makes sure consumers never see it again. It’s effective, but it’s hard to do. Links to negative content will be content you control or content that someone else controls. Obviously, removing content on a page you own is much easier than one you don’t.
Removing Web Pages You Own
In some cases, your Facebook or Yelp page may return negative results. Perhaps it’s a bad review or a negative comment. You can try updating your business profile information to be more positive and interesting. Alternatively, you can respond to comments in a professional and helpful way. If the situation is dire, you can even remove your profile altogether and create a new one. Keep in mind, some websites will keep the reviews public, even if your profile is removed.
How to Remove Content from Web Pages You Don’t Control
More often than not, a negative search result will happen on a page you don’t own. A blogger might publish a post about a bad experience with your company, or somebody may post negative personal information about you on a website. When you don’t own the site, removing negative content from Search Results is much more difficult and for those that are not familiar with SEO or internet marketing, it can often require professional help. While it’s not easy, however, in many cases removal of negative content from a third-party website can be done without any assistance. There are several ways to do this:
- Contact the website owner and ask them directly. For example, you can ask a blogger to remove their post. If you can explain why they should remove it, they may reconsider their stance on your company.
- Contact Google to remove sites that violate their policies. For example, publishing sensitive financial or personal information is against Google policies. Anything that can be used to commit fraud is not allowed. Offensive images or videos are also a violation. If you notice negative content that violates any of these policies, contact Google and ask for it to be removed. Bear in mind, the page will still exist, it just won’t appear in Google results anymore.
- Finally, there are cases where negative content may be unlawful, in which case you can take legal action. For example, online defamation, discrimination, copyright infringement, and other illegal content can be removed. This is risky territory, however. It could end up costing you thousands in legal fees and could even draw more attention to the negativity you were trying to remove in the first place. Consider the weight and the risks of taking legal action before you do so. You can find out more about removing unlawful content from search results here.
Suppress (or Bury) the Negative Content with Reverse SEO
Your other option for minimizing the reputation damage of negative content is with search engine suppression, also referred to as Reverse SEO. This is akin to fighting fire with fire. Instead of trying to remove content, you simply create more in an effort to bury the negative content in the search results. In most cases, suppression via Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – i.e. Reverse SEO – is not only effective at removing negative content from the first few pages of search results, but it also works to strengthen your online branding and/or promote your business in a positive light on search engines.
Most consumers will only visit the first few links returned in search results. As you create SEO-focused content, your page rises to the top of the search ranks, while other pages move down. If you can get the negative content pushed to the third or fourth page, it’s likely that consumers won’t even see it.
Suppressing the Bad Links
There are plenty of ways to bury the bad links on search results, all of which are very manageable and very effective:
- Setting up new social media profiles and making sure you’re active on all of them.
- Starting a company blog and posting excellent content regularly.
- Publishing other types of media, like podcasts, images, and videos.
- Optimizing content you already have on the web, like pages on your company site.
- Leaving comments on other influential websites within your industry.
- Become a thought leader by publishing expert advice in professional forums.
- Create quality content and link from your content from a variety of authoritative websites that are topically relevant to web pages you’re promoting.
Suppressing negative content is much like traditional SEO because the new content you create should be optimized for page rank. The more types of content you create, and the better the quality it is, the more likely it will be to rank above the negative content and make the negative item less noticeable.
The most important thing to remember when dealing with negative content about your business is to have a plan and be rational. It can be easy to feel a rush of bad emotions when reading unpleasant reviews or other unflattering content about your business. Instead, channel that energy into creating a strategy to bounce back and make the content disappear. Do so by getting the bad reviews or negative content removed or pushing it into the depths of search results, where studies have found that a very small percentage of people will actually reach when searching for a business on the internet.
Online Reputation Management Services to Remove and Suppress Negative Content
A number of internet privacy and reputation management companies now offer services to help people and businesses get things removed from the internet, either by
- Complete removal of the unwanted content from the website(s) that’ve published it, or
- Suppression of the negative search results on Google, Bing and other conventional web search engines.
Defamation Defenders, Reputation Defender, Reputation X, BrandYourself, RemoveOnlineInformation, for instance, are industry leading online reputation management companies that provide services to protect people’s privacy by monitoring and removing their information from people search and public database sites. These companies also provide other “information removal” services to get things like negative (defamatory) content, bad reviews, court cases, negative press and a plethora of other types of content that people don’t want showing up in search results removed from the internet or hidden on web searches.
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