Negative reviews are never pleasant – but what about when those reviews appear on the first page of Google, outranking even your own website? It’s a scary prospect, but it happens all the time.
Protecting your online reputation is becoming a serious issue nowadays, and specialist firms offer various services to give you back some control over protecting your good name.
But SEO tactics can also be put to use to bury bad reviews and unfair comments, and this article provides you with three easy steps to doing just that.
How Can Negative Reviews Gain Such Prominence?
The reason negative reviews can appear so high up in the SERPs so quickly is because they are often posted to sites which have a high PageRank/authority, (eg www.ripoffreport.com). Google is an active promoter of free speech, but this sometimes makes it easier for undesirable information to gain a high degree of visibility. There’s no point complaining about that, however. The only thing you can do is take action and fight back using what you know of SEO and the internet.
Step 1 – Find the Offending Keywords
First you need to do some research into which keywords are bringing up the negative reviews. First and foremost, check your website/company/personal name (these are the most common) plus any keywords that are specifically important to your business. Also, check for common informational searches by querying your ‘website/company/personal name + review’ or ‘+rating’. Once you’ve found the offending keywords, use a keyword tool to find out which of them are generating traffic and focus on these ones as any without much traffic don’t really matter.
Step 2 – Create & Post Web 2 Articles
Next, write 10 to 15 articles optimised for the keywords which are, or can potentially, cause you the most problems. Post these articles to web 2 sites such as: WordPress, Ezine Articles, Posterous, Multiply, LiveJournal, Tumblr, TypePad, Webs, Weebly, Squidoo and any others you know of.
These sites have high homepage PageRank, meaning the domains will react quicker and more effectively to backlinks than most other sites out there. Many of them also allow you to use your keywords in your URL for extra SEO weight, such as ‘yourname.wordpress.com’ or ‘yourkeyword.weebly.com’.
Step 3 – Build Links to the Web 2 Articles
The next stage is to try and get these articles ranking high for your chosen keywords, and to do this you need to create links pointing back to the articles. There are many tactics for this, but what you are looking for is quick links that can be created without too much effort.
One tactic is to build super-quick links from domain information sites, while another would be to reuse the articles and post them to article directories using the keywords to link back to the original web 2 articles. Duplicate content is not an issue here – if Google deems the web 2 pages and your articles to be duplicate content, all it will do is work out where the content was posted first and give priority to that page first – which is the overall aim anyway.
Bury the Negative Reviews
That’s all there is to it! Over time, some of these web 2 pages will make it to the first page of Google for your target keywords, gradually consigning the offending website off the front page where it won’t mean much to anyone.
This is an effective way to help you respond to any online bad publicity. If you ever find yourself facing a similar situation then take advantage of SEO tactics to make sure the right results are appearing when people search for you or your company online. Finally, will a heart full of endeavour, the same techniques can be used to ensure that you control all of content of the page 1 listings for your most desired keywords – now there’s a mouth watering thought!
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