What do searchers for your company or brand name see on the search results? Maybe something that would be misleading or derogatory about your website or business? Maybe consumer review sites, blogs and forums or competitors have made it difficult for you. They might be disgruntled customers or competitors who have some hostility to deal with.

If you’re in a situation where negative publicity is right in the search results, you need to know about ways to rectify your search engine presence. Even though you can’t make negative results disappear from the search engine indexes entirely, you can certainly deal with most of the problems if you will practice the following strategies.

Old Fashioned Networking. Contact the webmasters of the various websites in question. Politely request the removal of negative comments. They often cooperate, especially if you explain the problems at the root of the negative claim. But, remember that even if they remove the listing, the cached pages may remain on the search engine indexes for some time. But users who click through the search engine results will land on a page with the comments removed.

Also, check out some of the sites that already have something good to say about you. Send them a note of appreciation and offer them a link back from your website.

Check out some more winning ways to deal with Negative Press in Parts 2,3, and 4.

Such a Nice Boy,
Arthur Browning