Hi Folks,
I have a client withe pretty good organic search position. However, six years ago he was had a legal entanglement with a government agency, which is listed in google in one of the top positions when searching on his name. Enough of the description of the lawsuit is in the listing, not to mention on the government web page showing it, to discredit him, even though the matter is resolved long ago, and he has had no problems since then. Today he is running a legitimate and honest business, but this page is dramatically "damaging his company and his web sites, causing his business to suffer financially."

The question is whether or not there is some recourse with Google, since this is such an old listing (2000) or some other method, which can be used to either delist the offending listing or to reduce its Google position.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks,
RawFoodGuy

I've never heard of any SE offering a way to reduce a negative article. If you haven't seen it already, check out Andy's Online Reputation punchlist (http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/03/online-reputation-monitoring-beginners.html), but I think your client is going to find that he's either going to have to come up with a new online identity or confront the old issues on his own site.

There are folks who have sucessfully addressed this type of thing before. Basically they help a few other sites outrank the page that has the troublesome content and push it out of the top 10 for the specific keyword. Outranking an inside page on a government site should not be too hard to do, but of course some will be more difficult than others. Any competent SEO company should know how to do it.

That'll work for some, John, in fact that's how I got my start in seo ...seems there was this small..., ummm, nevermind. Anyway, that's exactly what we did, pushed the problem to page 3 and it eventually disappeared.

>top positions when searching on his name

With very specific searches and a gov site that has locked in on the same data, it's going to be tough. If people are searching on his name and particularly if there is an additional qualifier like company name, state, type of product, etc., thrown in the mix then the gov is likely to stay top 10. Well, maybe if he's John Smith.

> the gov is likely to stay top 10

Depends on the clients budget ;-)

Thanks folks. I appreciate your prompt response. Basically, it is what I figured, though I hoped for some insider secret or something....like creating a lot of unrelated inbound links to the page from non-relevant domains with the appearance of a link farm, maybe getting Google robots to automatically downgrade the page for using a link farm or something. Would that work, or would that itself be too unethical?
RFL

I wouldn't do anything that points to a gov page. I have my doubts as to whether the normal seo rules apply and you might just end up promoting the gov.

Here's an example that I think shows the power of gov sites in this kind of situation: Even with a couple of decades of movie celebrity status and all the resulting pages about that part of his life, if one searches on Arnold Schwarzenegger the gov site is number 3. Now I realize the page you're trying to displace is no where near the level of a Govinator.gov page but your client ain't likely to be the level of IMDB or Wikipedia, either.

But John is right, with enough time & money you might be able to rank a number of pages for the term(s) and displace it. My guess, though, is that your client is SOL.