Does anyone know why Google seems to display negative information about a company or individual before the companies own web site or information more relevant to the individual such as articles, PR etc...?

I am the marketing director for a large company and this can be an issue for us and some of our clients. In some cases despite best efforts mere mention of a name in the text of a blog comment will post higher than a recent PR, article or site using the person's name in the domain.

I saw a report on 20/20 with Lesley Stall and the CEO of Google who swore that their engine is not programmed to display negative first but she showed him with her name how that was the case.

Google don't give any preference to the content of good / bad comments - it's just down to the site that the content is hosted on and it's link weight relative to the rest of the search results.

That said, any PR results shouldn't be out ranking the company site from brand related searches - if they do, then there's something wrong with the SEO strategy of the company site.

It is reasonably easy to maintain a "clean" top 10 for key brand searches though - you just need to get a little creative about it. ;)

MG

We must be missing something because we have what we thought was needed in our company site. Title, Meta Tags etc... but the negatives sometimes post higher. Any ideas?

oldschool, there are over 100 factors taken into consideration with Google's scoring of sites, and many, many of those are related to inbound links.

We must be missing something because we have what we thought was needed in our company site. Title, Meta Tags etc... but the negatives sometimes post higher. Any ideas?Titles are important and unique meta descriptions should be there, unique for each page, but think well past those things for rankings.

Does anyone know why Google seems to display negative information about a company or individual before the companies own web site or information more relevant to the individual such as articles, PR etc...? Sure! Those other sites are closer to meeting the algorithm's criteria for rankings.