Negative Blog Post

[borgie]

I am working with a company who has some negative blog posts about their company on a fairly popular forum. The problem is when you do a search for their company it shows up in the top 10 listings on Google. The kicker is the guy who is writing these posts is doing it because he tried to cheat there system (the company is a meeting place for people offering services and people who can fulfill the services) instead of having a poor experience with the company so now he has made it his personal mission to put bad publicity about this company on the internet. Do any body have any ideas of how to get this posting removed or how to push down the result so that it does not show in the top 10 on Google anymore?

Our ideas:
1. Contact the forum and explain the story to them and ask to have it removed. The problem with this is if he sees his post removed ...this will just add fuel to the fire.
2. Try to build pages and get those pages high rankings for there company name to suppress those negative blog posts. This is hard because the main domain will always be #1 for the company name...and it has been hard to get the other pages higher than the negative blog post.

[mcanerin]

What you are talking about here is a sub-category of SEO called "reputation management." Although the concept has been around for a while (Amway and the Church of Scientology being two of the more well known early adopters), it being considered a separate service/category is relatively new.

Forums will sometimes remove posts if they are against the TOS or if the content is libelous, but it's really hit or miss. It's often worth a try, but depends heavily on the moderators involved. Usually it's just easier to reply in the forum itself and make sure that your version is right there beside theirs. Eventually, (assuming your story is accurate and it's really sour grapes on the other side, rather than a difference of opinion or both sides being in the wrong) either the two cancel each other out, or the forum admins get bored, remove the posts, and tell you to take it offline. In this forum (SEW) we usually don't even let it start, which is one of the reasons we have a "no outing" policy except in very exceptional circumstances.

The other tactic, which was also employed by Amway and the CoS, is creating/sponsoring/encouraging multiple sites to show up for the search term, thereby pushing the offending posts to the second page. In the old days, you could do this simply with brute force (and to a degree still can) but search engines are starting to "mix and match" their results in the top ten, which means trying to show a variation of different types of sites. So if you create a bunch of sites that all say that you are great, then you may only get one or two in the top ten no matter how hard you try. Sometimes you can get around this by creating different types of sites - review, news, commercial, etc - which have a higher chance of showing up in a varied results page. This is basically "burying the bad in the good".

The problem with this approach, of course, is that you are spamming. My preference is to go after the offending site first, if possible.

Having said that, sometimes it's simply a matter of a difference of opinion and no one will go out of their way to remove something you don't like. It's really up to the specifics of the case.

Ian

[MtraX]

This brings about the issue that companies will have who adopt a Web 2.0 approach of user generated content. On sites that you can't control, the best idea would be to register and submit a neutral statement of how such an issue was resolved. As mentioned, everyone has their own opinion. If the information posted is incorrect, you stand a good chance of swaying the situation and getting free publicity. If not, some damage control is in order. It would be best for the company's public relations officer (or contracted PR agency) to prepare something in reply. Yesterday I read about a company (new industries seem to pop up everywhere!) that specialised in monitoring any consumer generated content and helping you respond with proper reputation management. Interesing times!

[borgie]

Do you have a link to that company?

[BuckfastMonk]

IMO if you counter the post with a valid one of your own it usually does the trick. I should point out that you should be careful that competitor number 2 and not competitor number 3 is leaving the feedback.

At the end of the day it makes them look childish and is best just ignored. If they are spending time with this they obviously havent enough to do

[caugas]

Forums and blogs are tricky, the internet leaves slander and libelous comments are certainly one of the internets pitfalls, however, one could argue that the internets main purpose in the transfer of information, good or bad.

IMO, most people can see through comments on a forums or message boards, They are not the most trusted source on the net in comparision to the WSJ or NY Times or other online journals.