When people find negative publicity about themselves online, the first reflex is often to “bury” negative search results by making lots of new profiles and pages on other domains. This occasionally works well… but it’s usually an incredibly slow process — and it often fails completely.

Here’s why: Google likes and trusts the domain that is showing the negative result. That’s why it shows up on the first page. It’s sometimes a lot easier to create a new page on the same domain, than it is to try and create dozens of new pages on other domains and build trust for them. Try to leverage the trust of the domain that Google already loves!

How to Bury Google Search Results

Google likes to show pages from multiple different domains on the first page. Usually it will pick a single listing from 10 different domains to fill up the first 10 results. If a domain is trusted and it has closely matching content, Google will sometimes show one or two additional pages “indented” below the first listing from the main domain.

But many times, if you can create a newer, far more link-rich and “better” page on the exact same domain – it will just throw the bad search result onto page 2 or 3!

How to Bury Bad Blog Posts

If you are mentioned negatively in a Huffington Post article that wasn’t a big hit, then register for the site with your full name and get your own social profile page – and participate heavily to build internal linkjuice. You could also become one of the guest bloggers for the Huffington Post local metropolitan areas and cover some local events. You’ll get another “author” page with your name in the URL… Point some external links to these new pages and see if you can get Google to see those pages as more linked-to and more relevant page on the Huffington Post. If you’re successful, your “bad” article may drop out of the search results for your name.

If you can’t become a guest blogger or make a profile on the blog, you might be able to comment strategically and point links at a specific blog comment URL (if the content management system creates them).

How to Bury Bad Newspaper Stories or “Police Blotter” Listings

If your arrest was written up in a newspaper’s police blotter, and the editors refuse to change or delete it, then your best bet is to make a more flattering page on the same domain and get Google to notice it. Write top-notch letters to the editor until one of them is published with your full name and placed online. If the site accepts blog-style comments, then comment, using your full name, on other articles on the site. Hang out at local events where reporters are certain to be present and hound them with quotes until they take down your name and age. Do some serious PR and do whatever it takes to get mentioned in that publication in a positive or neutral light. As a last resort – take out an online classified at a yearly rate or write up a fake obituary for someone with the same name as yours (born in 1911).

Then point links at this new & neutral page mentioning your name, using proper anchor text, and wait for Google to love it even more.

How to Edit Negative Wikipedia Articles Out of Google

You can make your own user page (example) on Wikipedia and build internal and external links. You can sneak your name into the footnotes of neglected, unwatched articles… and chatter away on vacant talk pages. You can create articles and stubs about your organization and pray they won’t be deleted – snipe away the deletion flags in the middle of the night – sometimes it works!

How to Remove Negative Forum Posts

If there’s a bad post about you on a forum that’s showing up in the search results, join the forum and surreptitiously post your own neutral thread. Point links to it.

How to Remove Negative Digg, Reddit, Mixx or Propeller Stories

If someone submitted a story about you to a social news site and it didn’t get many votes, you might be able to remove it by submitting a neutral story with your name in the headline. Point links to your new story’s URL on the same social news site. Create your own tag page on Propeller or Delicious. Make your own subdomain on StumbleUpon or Ning. Then pray.

How to Bury Negative BlogCatalog Result Pages

There’s a blog directory site called BlogCatalog which has a lot of trust and authority (PageRank 7, 16 million inlinks) in Google. BlogCatalog that indexes blog posts on a number of given topics. If you are mentioned or tagged in a negative blog post on a two-bit, unknown domain… that blog post might not show up on the front page of Google but the negative info can show up on Blog Catalog’s category pages- which are likely to show up in the search results. (Because the BlogCatalog domain is stronger and more trusted than the small blog who first wrote about you.)

So submit your own blog to BlogCatalog and tag yourself in some posts. Or hire other bloggers who are members of the network to mention you in tags or in the headline. The bad listings will wash off the first page of the BlogCatalog topic pages, and eventually when the BlogCatalog topic page gets crawled by Google again… you’ll have a clean online reputation.

Stealthy, Strategic ORM vs. the “Caveman” Approach

Try these techniques first… before you engage in the “caveman” approach of trying to create new pages on 10-to-20 different domains and rank all of them. If making a new, neutral page on the same domain and ranking it proves impossible… then should you try to bury negative content through more brute force.

Do you have any personal experience (or ideas) on how to bury negative publicity in the search engines without trying to outrank it using other domains?

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Online impersonation is one of the most dangerous kinds of online reputation problems. It happens when someone else assumes your identity and communicates using your real name, photograph or avatar.

Communicating under someone’s else name and identity is online impersonation. It is a crime in most places.

Sometimes they’ll hack into your real accounts, other times they’ll just create fake profiles or comments purporting to be “you.” They may be motivated by revenge, sadism, extortion, or playing some kind of twisted prank.

The reputation damage caused by impersonating someone online can be substantial and hard to clean up. Here are some things you should know:

The Law & Impersonating Someone Online

• Online impersonation is (arguably) illegal in most jurisdictions. First Amendment “free speech” protects people’s right to share their unflattering opinions, but it usually does not protect unauthorized speaking or writing under someone else’s name or identity. Some states, like Texas, have specifically outlawed online impersonation on social media sites. Most other states have more general laws about “criminal harassment” or “identity theft” that can apply to certain online impersonation scenarios.
• Many police and sheriff’s departments now have “cyber crime” divisions. The computer crime units are often obligated to help out in cases of libelous online impersonation – but the detectives’ caseload and level of technical expertise varies among jurisdictions. It’s usually best to try and resolve the issue yourself before getting police involved, but if you reach a dead end, they will often help with researching and negotiating on your behalf.
• Online impersonating may be grounds for a successful civil court case. If negotiation, law enforcement help and/or online reputation building are unable to undo the damage – you may have grounds to threaten or file a lawsuit to mandate content removal or a cash settlement. Lawsuits often create additional animosity, so only do this is a last resort.

Identifying and Tracking Your Online Impostor

If you know who did it, you might be able to explain the legal ramifications and quickly get the online impostor to remove the false information. If you aren’t sure who is responsible, you’ll have to do some internet detective work:

• Find Their IP Address. An IP address is a unique “serial number” that identifies a specific computer or device (like a shared wireless router). Most blogs and social sites capture the IP address of visitors and commenters. This information can usually only be viewed by the owner or administrator of the site. If you contact them with a friendly letter explaining you are being impersonated online, they’ll often give it to you. If they won’t give it to you, sometimes they’ll give it to a detective or an attorney. If your impersonator used a proxy server to obscure their IP address, most proxy owners will give information to police detectives or upon being served a legal subpoena. This tool can help you find the internet service provider who owns the IP address, and they may have give it to you or the police in a serious incident.
• Making a List of All the Damage. Carefully search for your name and e-mail address — in quotes (“John Smith”) — in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Dig deep… far back page one and two of the search results… and use a tool like NameChk.com to see if your username is registered on social sites. Save every URL that contains evidence of impersonation in a spreadsheet so you can managed and remove it.
• Completely Change Your Passwords. If your password was compromised — or even if it wasn’t and using the same password across all your sites and accounts — now would be a great time to change all of them. Use a simple password algorithm or tool to help you remember all of them.
• Monitor Against Ongoing Impersonation. Make your own reputation monitoring dashboard, or use a commercial reputation monitoring service to track your name in case any new incidents pop up.

Removing the Damage & Clearing Your Name

Use a combination of tact and tech savvy to get the mess cleaned up once and for all:

• Examine the Terms of Service on Sites Where You Were Impersonated. Most social media sites, ISPs and blogs have a terms-of-service (ToS) that is designed to legally cover their tracks. It explicitly spells out what kind of behavior and content is allowed and not allowed on their site. Many social sites’ ToS explicitly ban impersonating someone online – for example, here under section 4d. Many blog hosting sites, like Blogger.com, forbid it also. Citing their own policy is good ammunition to help get it removed ASAP.
• Contact the Webmaster or Blogger and Ask for Removal. Write to the administrators of the sites and blogs you were impersonated on, tactfully explain the situation and how it’s impacting your life – and kindly ask (not demand) they remove it. Be pleasant but persistent until you get some kind of response. You may have to hunt for their e-mail address. Note: many big sites have a “legal@example.com address for these kinds of issues.
• Tell Search Engines to Remove the Deleted Content from Their Index. Once you have successfully had the impersonating remarks removed from the blogs and pages, you should let Google know it is gone by using the Webpage Removal Request Tool. Check the box that says “the information has been deleted by the webmaster.” In my experience, the listing’s description and cache should disappear within a couple of days, but the blue title link may take longer to officially fade away. Yahoo has a Report Abuse” form and Bing has a feedback form with options to report spam. Try it!
• As a Last Resort, Contact the ISP. The ISP (internet service provider) may be required to take down defamatory information or forgeries (in certain jurisdictions), so if all else fails you should inquire about their policy. This can get expensive, contentious and complex, according to this history of online takedown notices.
• Don’t Get Revenge by Counter-impersonating or Doing Anything Illegal. If someone has committed a crime against you, don’t do anything illegal or morally questionable (impersonating someone online as revenge) that is likely to get yourself in trouble also!
• Optional: Blog About the Incident to Publicly Clear Your Name. If you have the courage and transparency to say what happened in your real voice, people are very likely to believe the truth – far more than anything that seems suspiciously out of character. If you don’t have a personal blog of your own, find a high-ranking site (like a university or company website) to post the truth and clear you name. Get your friends and family to link to the article so it will be more visible.

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Some online reputation repair campaigns are relatively easy. You build great pages and get links from good neighborhoods and the “bad” content slowly washes away.

Other times, it is maddeningly difficult. Seeming impossible.

Google’s will find a third-rate slander page (with 1995 design and sloppy writing) and seemingly weld it to #3. You can rank content above or below it, and Google won’t budge the negative listing from its place. The normal laws of SEO don’t apply…

A stubborn listing that won’t budge from the front page, no matter what. image: Semaforo

SEO Rand Fishkin blogged about this phenomena a few months back and asked if a “Query Deserves Diversity” algorithm exists at Google? I have observed this phenomena firsthand, and I agree that it exists.

How Diversity Helps Search Engine Users

Diversified search results help the end user to quickly find the tone or “flavor” of content they are looking for.

Say someone is searching for “alcohol” – it would be ideal to serve up a mixed brew: the Wikipedia entry on “alcohol (solvent),” the Bacardi liquor page, and then the Mothers Against Drunk Driving “Alcohol Abuse Facts” page. Same thing with a search like “Scientology.” It would benefit searchers to display the organization’s official site and also a popular Scientology critic site near the top – so people can get a balanced picture, quickly.

How The Diversity Algorithm Can Destroy Reputations

If someone publishes a defamatory page and it gets included as a diversity result by Google, it can make a nearly indelible mark against your reputation.

Google’s semantic analysis algorithms appear to identify when a page is negative, or “against” a certain topic or keyphrase, by using on-page text and link anchor text. Some suspected trigger words I have noticed before are things like are “anti” (as in Anti-PayPal site) and “sucks.” Googlebot determines that this page is the most relevant negative page, and it pushes it up onto the front page and locks it there until another, stronger semantically negative page comes along.

If a site displays sitelinks for a negative search phrase (i.e. “PayPal sucks”) – it’s a sign that Google recognizes and “trusts” the site:

Negative sites with sitelinks can be among the most difficult to suppress.

In June, I had the chance to ask Google search engineers about the diversity algorithm. In their non-committal “politician” way of answering things, they alluded that there is some kind of algorithmic tendency designed to serve up a wide range of results. They are aware it can have intense negative consequences on companies and individuals, so a Googler was looking at algorithmic ways to make some defamatory information rank less prominently. They stressed that these “softening” algorithms weren’t yet in use at Google, but they “might someday” be.

Until then, here are some possible ideas on how you can deal with Google’s diversity algorithm:

• Think outside the box. When conventional reputation management techniques aren’t gonna work, get creative. Think beyond conventional internet marketing. Think about social engineering and psychology. Don’t spend money on links or waste your time fighting a impossible battle. Instead… think of ways you can buy the site, pull the plug on the post, or pull some strings to awaken a change in the webmaster’s heart.
• Make your own negative page first. If you are involved in a business venture that is bound to attract controversy, be sure and register you own “…sucks.com” – and do it under an anonymous name and host it on a different IP block than your main websites. (If you host and register it with the same info, Google will know it is yours.) You can use words link “scam,” “sucks” and “anti-” in a tongue-in-cheek way. That way you own the first “negative” page – and you control it.

This is a “fake” negative page about MLM. It is actually designed to promote MLM and generate leads.

Hardcore, Bonus Tip:

Richard Zwicky’s presentation in “The Best Kept Secrets in Search” at SES San Jose has some very hardcore tactics to frame negative domains and “hijack” them straight out of the search index. We don’t use these kind of techniques, and if you do, you could run into legal problems or Google problems… so explore at your own risk!

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Recently, the PR firm representing a very famous and lavishly wealthy public figure called me. One of his projects had gotten a lot of bad press. They asked how much it would cost to remove the negative information from Google.

I looked at the search results: A hit piece in the New York Times. A municipal judgment document from the state supreme court. A world-famous blog (PageRank 7) with a post criticizing it. Negative forum backlash. A dedicated opposition website. I told the PR firm that his situation couldn’t be cured or “erased” – not even if I charged $5,000,000 up front and I were to hire an entire dedicated team of blackbelt SEOs and PR mavens. Even then, we might only be able to move the results it a little. It didn’t matter how rich this person was – this instance of online negative publicity was virtually unfixable. Not even a presidential pardon could clear the search engines. You’d have to bribe a Google quality engineer or wait for a Y3K meltdown. Way unlikely.

“Easy” Online Reputation Management Scenarios

• Copied or Stolen Information

If someone is stealing your copyrighted work, you have some legal leverage to try and force removal. Politely explain your legal case to the Webmaster. If that fails, you can file a DCMA takedown notice with the ISP – or with the search engines. If this fails, then you may have grounds to force removal in a court of law.

• One or Two Isolated Listings

A single blemish is much more manageable than an “outbreak” of bad information.

• Low Ranking Pages

An isolated listing at #7 might be fairly easy to push off. A #1 or #2 might need heavy social media marketing and SEO campaigns.

• Information is Hosted on a Third Party Site

You may be able to remove this by appealing to a moderator or citing a terms of service.

• Verifiably False & Deliberately Defamatory Information

Here you may have some legal leverage. Laws protect publishers who are reporting facts (“This person was arrested“) and stating opinions (“I think this restaurant totally sucks“), but they often do not protect people who are deliberately defaming or making untrue accusations.

“Impossible” Online Reputation Management Scenarios

In my experience, situations where “true facts” are reported by multiple news sources and government agencies are the most difficult situations to erase.

• Multiple negative search results

If there is a whole swarm of negative listings, it can be very difficult to displace all of them.

• National News Incident “Picked up” by Dozens of Sources

This is an extremely difficult situation to cure. News sites tend to be hardy and difficult to “wash out.”

• Deliberate Reputation “Assassination”

If a grudge-holding, SEO-savvy individual has gone out of their way to post negative information about you on multiple websites, and then intentionally optimized the sites and and built links to the nasty pages – it can be extremely difficult to ever wipe clean. Big companies and famous individuals with hundreds-of-thousands of search results for their same are often strong enough to protect against this. Small companies and individuals with little online presence are incredibly vulnerable.

• Government and Military Injunctions, Judgments, and Records

Just because you’ve cleared something up with the law doesn’t mean that Google forgets about you. Google loves to index government sites and will often rank pages on them very highly – for years to come.

• Privately Published, Anonymously Registered “Smear” Sites

Sometimes Google seems to “lock in” on the most authoritative negative site and display it right near the top… keeping it cemented there despite all effort to improve your image with SEO. Google appears to have a “diversity algorithm” that will serve up weak but semantically critical or negative pages so that searchers can find the type of content they are looking for. I doubt this “PayPal sucks” site will ever leave the front page:

What Can Be Done in “Impossible” Situations

Even when the damage is deep – there are things you can do to, at least, make the situation more bearable.

1. Optimize one “explanatory” page.



When it is impossible to outrank multiple pages, you can focus your efforts into getting just one “explanatory” page into the top of the search results. Make this page stand out with special text characters in the title tag – but keep it 65 characters or less so the whole thing will display. Put a well-crafted sentence or two in the meta description tag – the two black sentences that show up below the blue headline in the search results. Keep the meta description less than 175 characters or it will get chopped-off and replaced with a “…“. On this SEO-optimized page you can tell your side of the story. Then build quality links to it – SLOWLY. If you build low quality links or you add links to a new page too fast, it can get kicked out of the search results. This won’t “make it all go away,” but it will let you have your say. And ranking just one page is usually attainable.

2. Change your company name.

If your online reputation is destroyed on multiple authority sites, it can be much easier to change the name of your business — or even your own personal name – than it would be to completely overtake negative pages in the search engines. This is dramatic and extremely unfortunate, but sadly, true in many severe cases. The amount of labor required to “make everything go away” runs in the $100,000 – $10,000,000 range and could easily take years – if one were able to assemble a competent enough “dream team” to do it. This is the cold, hard truth that inexperienced or disreputable “online reputation management firms” don’t want you to know.

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Imagine that one day, you are shocked to find your business name listed on a pornographic / adult spam page. Or someone has posted as copy of your driver’s license or social security number on a website for revenge. Or what if you search for something harmless in Google Images… and find a deeply disturbing, xxxx-rated picture?

Asking Google to Remove Negative Links

Google offers a little-known service called the Webpage Removal Request Tool.

This tool allows you to request the removal of certain types of pages from its search index. Anyone with a Gmail / Google account can request that an offensive or “dead” page be removed. Google says they will personally consider all requests, and they will notify you when (and if) a page is removed.

Google tries hard not to play judge or arbitrator; they give you the burden of trying to contact the webmaster and and asking her remove the negative information, first. If the Webmaster agrees to remove the offensive information (lucky you!), you can then follow up with Google’s Webpage Removal Request Tool to make sure the cache of the old version gets wiped out of Google’s index.

If you are unable to contact the Webmaster or get them to cooperate in taking the bad information down, Google lists 4 kinds of web pages that they will consider hand-editing right out of their index. Pages that contain:

• Your social security or government ID number
• Your bank account or credit card number
• An image of your signature
• Your full name or the name of your business appearing on an adult content site that’s spamming Google’s search results.

are all eligible to be manually deleted from Google’s index.

Even though those are the explicit criteria Google asks for, it wouldn’t hurt to ask for the removal of any very offensive or defamatory page using this tool. Google is unlikley to do it or to give a personal response, but at the very least someone with the power to take action is likely to take a look at it.

How Long Does A Web Page Removal Request Take?

Many people have submitted a removal request and they impatiently wonder how long does a Google web page removal request take?

When you submit a request to Google, it goes into a queue and it is reviewed as soon as possible by an anonymous human editor at Google. While your request is waiting to be examined, it will show a status of “pending” :

A human at Google will get to reviewing it as soon as possible, depending upon their workload. My own requests have been processed within 4 to 48 hours. Other people have reported waiting times ranging from 1 to 7 days.

Once a decision is made, you can log back into the tool and you will see the page marked either “removed” or “denied.”

The pages or (negative information on part of the page) will sometimes be taken out of the search results before the Web Page Removal Request Tool gets updated.

How long does it take Google to remove the cache of a page once it is deleted?

Sometimes Google will partially remove a page from the index. It will still show a single blue link to the page, but your name or information will no longer show up in the description.

It will also not have a cache, or snapshot of the old information from the last time Google crawled the page. In my experience, these pages usually go away when replaced with more information on the topic but it can take more time (sometime months).

Explore this tool and let me know what you find out about it in the comments below!

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Sometimes a negative result will stick to the front page of Google’s index, and it will won’t move easily – no matter how much new content or links you create to outperform it. In these situations, removing the links that point to a negative page can make it appear less relevant, and therefore less visible in the search results. By following the same general procedures as link building, you can persuade Webmasters to remove links to negative pages.

Undoing Negative Links – image:mesho

There are currently three main strategies for reducing the relevance of negative search engine results:

1. Build up positive and neutral content to outrank the negative page.
   
2. Negotiate or pull strings to get the negative page removed.
   
3. Ask other Webmasters to remove their links to the negative page.
   

I call the third technique “reverse” link building. It works best in smaller cases where there are less than a hundred links to the negative page. Reverse link building is challenging because the Webmaster has already written content and decided to link to a negative result – and you have to convince them to re-think their decision and change what is there. People can get really analytical and philosophical about why they are getting edited or censored – and look “too far” into your request.


Here are some best practices for removing links to a negative article:

Find All the Links to Negative Page

Go to Yahoo Site Explorer. Paste the full URL of the negative article into the search box and click the “Explore URL” button, then click the blue link that says “Inlinks.” This will show all of the pages linking to the negative article. An easier way to do this is through install SearchStatus, an excellent SEO extension for Firefox.

You can also look at the trackbacks of a negative blog post to see which other blogs are “endorsing” it – or you can look in Technorati for “reactions” to a blog or blog post. Make an exhaustive list of all the negative links in a spreadsheet. Then go examine the sites closely to see where they link to the negative content.

Finding the Person With the Power to Remove the Negative Link

The first challenge is finding up-to-date contact information for the Webmaster of each site that links to the negative article. If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a working e-mail or phone number listed on the site. Otherwise: do a WhoIs and write down all the phone numbers, use the contact form and look at the source code, Google search for any nicknames, look closely into any affiliate links for clues, check the backlink profile to find related sites linking to it. Look into the internet archives cache or prior registrations to see if you can find the old owners. If you still can’t find any clues or solid contact information, then leave a blog comment or guestbook post – or even place an order (!) – and leave a note with your e-mail address, asking them to contact you about an urgent matter pertaining to their website.

Using Tact and Persuasion to Negotiate Removal

For the initial contact, I’ve found it’s best not to get too detailed and heavy right off the bat. Start by making a connection and showing that your e-mail is not spam.

Hi! My name is Brett, and I appreciate the detailed information you have up at ExplicitVitaminReviews.com. For years I have taken Vitamin C to maintain my health during the cold winter season, but I had no idea the brand they sell at my local K-mart is biologically inactive. I’ll definitely look into the California Sunshine line of supplements you recommend.”

Next, you’re going to have to ask VERY nicely, and make a good case for why the link should be removed. You might want to save it for the next e-mail or a phone call, and just establish connection with the first contact. If you come across as a threat, hassle or annoyance at any point in the process – you will lose. Be friendly. And be pleasantly persistent.

Reasons Why They Should Take It Down

Often times, Webmasters “innocently” link to negative articles because they are trying to be fair and balanced – to tell both sides of the story. Explain that the article is having a negative impact on your website, and give some of the following reasons why it should be removed, if appropriate:

1. The information is out of date.
2. The information is false / inaccurate.
3. The website is a bad neighborhood you don’t want to link to.
4. The article is a ‘revenge piece’ written by a competitor.
5. The link doesn’t really add any value to their readers.
6. There is a much better contrary view at http://example.com
7. The link means little to them, but has significant impact on your site

If e-mail doesn’t get a response after a couple of tries, move to telephone and lastly send a non-threatening personal letter. Ask for the removal with kindness and humility. If that doesn’t work, then offer to help the webmaster by giving them links, sending a thank you gift, or doing whatever you can to help their business and website. As a very last resort, you can offer payment.


If they are adamant about keeping a link to a negative article, suggest another better-quality article they could link to or ask them to rel=”nofollow” it.

If you’re really patient, intuitive and cool… you can get many of those negative links undone by using this strategy. A few weeks later, when all the pages get re-crawled, the negative result will appear somewhat less “relevant” to the search engines.

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Just as there are countless “credit repair” companies who claim they can erase past debts, there are now a multitude of reputation management firms claiming they can “remove negative search engine listings.”

A Spotless Reflection. image credit: benprks

So, can negative listings actually be removed from Google? Not just making them less visible by pushing them down off the first page… but actually making it so the page no longer exists?

“Yes, it is possible to remove some types of pages.”

But the most common kind of web reputation damage – strong pages on strong domains that have been consistently ranking for months or years – are often incredibly difficult to budge. The owner won’t take them down till hell freezes over, you have no valid legal case, and Google won’t give your (more recently created) pages the same weight.

But negative results can sometimes be permanently changed or removed with persistence, tact and savvy. Here’s how:

8 Ways to Remove Negative Results from the Google

1. Ask Nicely

I’ve gotten nasty information removed by calling the blogger and having a nice long “blogger to blogger” talk with them. Appeal to their conscience. Explain why it’s good for them to change the information, and explain why hosting negative or defamatory info might reflect poorly on their own website. Don’t accuse them of bad journalism or insult them – respect the effort they took to make the content but urge them to consider an alternate headline, tone, etc. Ask if there’s anything you could do to help them out in exchange (write a review, give a link, do SEO for their site, send them a “thank you” gift, etc.).

2. Ask the moderator to remove the offending thread or post

Sometimes the author of the information won’t budge, but a forum or social site moderator will want to avoid conflict and will be more receptive to removing defamatory or misleading information. It usually doesn’t hurt to ask.

3. Audit the site for Google Webmaster Guidelines violation, and report them

Check to see if the site is buying or selling any paid links, keyword stuffing, hiding text, cloaking content, or doing anything else in direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If you find anything spammy, report the site to Google or report paid links inside of Google Webmaster Tools console.

4. File a DMCA Takedown Notice

If the site is infringing on your trademarks or copying your content, and they are located or hosted in the USA, you can file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice with the OSP (online service provider) and if that fails, you can file it with the search engines. Check out this excellent guide to enforcing copyrights.

5. Offer a Cash Payment / Settlement

Some people have successfully offered a cash settlement to have negative information down. A lot of online bloggers are in it for the money, and so are most of the reputation extortionists (Web publishers, like the RipoffReport, who encourage and directly profit from anonymous complaint content). It could be cheaper and easier to “pay to make it go away” than to pay for months of reputation management, content and link building efforts. Beware, though, of opening yourself up to ongoing extortion. And be careful of what you put in writing. You might want to contact the webmaster anonymously, by telephone, to test their response to such an offer, rather than send them a written letter or e-mail that they could reprint on their website.

6. Threaten a Lawsuit

You can send an official-looking letter threatening to sue people for defamation, and that could be enough to scare people into taking down content. Beware: if you threaten to sue someone, make sure you have a case and actually plan on following through with it, if necessary. Many times, I’ve seen legal threats backfire and make the situation flare up much worse. Threats of litigation bring out a harsh and unforgiving side in people, and it can prompt your defamer to want to “stick it to you” even worse.

For more detailed legal information on some of these suggestions, ChillingEffects.org or any of the excellent posts of SEOmoz’s legal expert Sarah Bird are great places to start.

Blackhat Reputation Management Tactics:

It’s important to be aware of some of the more heavy-handed tactics, even if you don’t practice them yourself:

1. Negative SEO

For a long time, people believed that “nothing another Webmaster can do will be able to harm your websites’ rankings.” According to some black hat SEO experts, that is not true anymore. Negative SEO techniques, such as link spamming or buying penalized sites in a similar niche and 301 redirecting them to to your competitor’s pages, are “enough to have a relatively dramatic impact on rankings.” This Forbes article on negative SEO is pretty well-done and interesting.

2. Counter-Attack the Reputation of Your Critic

Some people have successfully counter-attacked their defamer, by anonymously exposing “fabricated” details of their past, making a YourDefamerSucks.com site, or filing a Ripoff Report about their business. This would theoretically give you a stronger bargaining position to suggest that you mutually withdraw the negative information – by kicking some empathy into your defamer. I haven’t done this, as I am not really a “digital hitman” for hire – but I’ve heard others have done it successfully.

The Importance of Making Good Web Karma

In the social media era, we all live in very transparent, digital “glass houses.” And throwing stones is as easy as a few clicks on the keyboard.

Remember that defaming others on the Web can have a profoundly destructive impact on their business, career and life.

Interact with kindness, humanity and positivity and start creating positive content now to build a spotless reputation on the Web. Monitor your reputation, and quickly and tactfully respond to grievances and to make sure they don’t escalate or get cemented into the search results.

And think of these removal techniques as an emergency last resort, when all else has failed.

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I’d love to hear your own ideas and experiences with removing negative links in the search engines. Please leave your comments below…!

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It’s important to act quickly – the moment an online reputation issue is first detected. The longer you leave an undesirable search result to sit in the open, unchallenged, the more likely it will get “cemented” into place. When an interesting result stays on the first page or two of the search engine results, people (and automated content scraping sites) have a tendency to link to it and reinforce it.

Here are 13 types of pages that can contain negative buzz:

1. Authoritative Government Pages

Difficulty: (10/10)

The reputation management kiss of death is an entire negative page on an powerful government website. If the US Embassy, Federal Post Office, or the Securities and Exchange Commission dedicate a web page to warning about you, it’s almost impossible to compete with.

2. Feature Articles on Top-Tier News Sites

Difficulty: (9/10)

Top-tier news sites (CNN, BBC) pack a lot of domain strength – and they stick to search result pages pretty hard.

3. Popular Wikipeida Entries

Difficulty: (9/10)

The general populace has adopted the site it as the quickie research tool of choice – and their countless citations have strengthened it. Many Wikipedia entries on companies or public figures contain a “criticism” section, but the contents are supposed to contain verifiable facts (lawsuits, convictions, news incidents). You generally don’t have to worry about people saying you “suck,” but widely-held opinions and factual incidents can get worked into Wikipedia.

4. Articles On Authority Blogs

Difficulty: (8/10)

Removing negative blogs can be difficult. A post with dozens or hundreds of comments denotes significant buzz and interest, and it also creates copious amounts of keyword-rich content. Best try to remove negative blog posts quickly – by contacting the author, responding in the comments and taking SEO action – as appropriate.

5. “…Sucks.com” sites.

Difficulty: (7/10)

Dot com sites that contain the keyword plus a pejorative term in the URL are a challenge, but they aren’t impossible. They have a sticky tendency to linger around, because search engines (particularly Google) like to display a wide, balanced range of opinions and content so users can pick their own flavor. Sometimes “…sucks.com” or “…scam.com” sites are propped up by just a handful of links from the owner and they can be worked around. But if they enjoy widespread support and link popularity, it can be a real uphill battle.

6. Rip-Off Report Listings

Difficulty: (6/10)

The Rip-Off Report is a notorious “consumer complaint” site that encourages people to vent their accusations and frustrations, and it allegedly profits from blackmailing business owners. Because the content is so “interesting” it enjoys a lot of domain authority in Google, but I’ve found its listings can often be outranked with a little bit of elbow grease.

7. Active Social Media Profiles

Difficulty: (6/10)

Social networking sites are link rich and user-generated content pages on them can rank well. An active social media account with your brand in the username could theoretically outrank your company’s official site.

8. Press Releases

Difficulty: (4/10)

Syndicated press releases can show up strongly in the search results, but they are often temporary and fade out with time (especially if they don’t get picked up).

9. Personal Blogs

Difficulty: (4/10)

Personal blogs and others with limited readership and anemic link strength are easy enough to outrank with any of the kinds of pages listed above.

10. Forum Posts

Difficulty: (3/10)

These days, search engines seems to be show more respect for blogs than forum posts and some forum software creates posts with poor on-page optimization and dynamic URLs. But watch out: over time, an interesting forum post can develop into a comprehensive, linked-to authority document on a brand or topic.

11. Made for AdSense (MFA) or Weak Affiliate Pages

Difficulty: (2/10)

As domain trust and on-page analysis (looking for affiliate code, link networks, ‘quality score’) becomes more advanced, pages that are highly commercialized – without a quality backlink profile to support them – tend to be rather wimpy.

12. Off-topic Pages

Difficulty: (2/10)

Pages that are completely focused on a subject (mentioning it in the title tag, headlines, and numerous times in the text) are typically much stronger than pages that just “randomly” mention a person or brand once down in the bottom. You can sometimes identify an off-topic page because the description will be pulled from the text and truncated with an ellipses (“…”). Creating your own page just about anywhere and optimizing it can often outrank off-topic page mentions.

13. Spam pages

Difficulty: (1/10)

There are thousands of automated bots scour the web, looking for fresh content to turn into a word salad of web spam for a quick buck. Sometimes they will “scrape” negative news items or headlines from the search results and re-display it. Random spam pages are typically the weakest of all web pages, and they can be overtaken by just about any other kind of web page.

What Do You Think?

These ratings are very rough estimates based on my own experience with reputation management campaigns. However, every single situation and search result page is different!

What kinds of search results have you found to be the most difficult to outrank?

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