how do I clean up my company name?

[donquixote]

I have a client who has a specific problem. When you go to google and type in their "company name" their company does pop up as #1. The problem is Rip-Off Report is #2 and compaintsboard is #3. The 2 complaints were both from the same customer from a long time ago.

My immediate job is to fix the google "company name" search so those 2 complaints no longer exist on their first page search. Does anyone have a suggestion how to do this?

thanks,
Donny

[nickseo]

We have a client in a very similar position and id like to hear what others have to say about this. for us, the website is a bout a musician but there is a porn star who has the same name and although the clients site comes up first, position 2 and 3 are porn, doesnt look very good really.

So far weve thought of promoting the musicians myspace and facebook pages and possibly writing a wikipedia piece on her...any other suggestions?

[SteveGerencser]

Create additional sites for your client.. MySpace, Facebook, Squidoo, LinkedIn, etc etc etc.. Work on those to get them to outrank the porn site.. Cross link them to give them all a boost..

More pages and more places that have her name the better..

Donny, the obvious first answer is to answer those complaints openly and honestly on the rip-off sites.. This way if someone does see them and read them they also see how the company deals with complaints..

[SemAdvance]

Its very simple

Build out new sites/ blogs/ pages about the company or person.

Link to those new sites / blogs/ pages with anchor text links based on the company / persons name.

You can do quite well with paid anchors from directory sites, then use hugbpages squidoo gather hi5 facebook linkedin wikidpedia aboutus etc to build authority to your newly created pages / sites / blogs.

Can also try article writing and submitting to articlesbase and ezinearticles using anchor text link in the authors resource box.

Hope this helps!

[Venus]

We've just brought a website with the same problem and I've tried to get a response posted on the sites in question, but they just ignore my emails.

[junosama]

1. Buy links to the home page using the company brand name

2. Start a blog with links back to the main site using the brand name

3. Make sure the home page title has the brand name and do some on page optimization.

4 Do some article submissions and press releases linking back using the brand name

[DiannaKersey]

Another item that you want to address is who is creating the bad press? Are they building a link campaign to keep the bad press higher up in the SERPs and why? And who is linking to those backlinks?

We had a client with A LOT of bad press. We had to build web pages, individual bios, blog posts, press releases, articles, you name it and SEO optimize very well.... to the nines! Anyways... after building link campaigns to these individual componenets, we were able to surmount the bad press that was outranking before we began.

It takes time and patience and even contacting WHO is linking to the bad press and give them the REAL TRUTH to the story and ask them to remove the link. This will help take away link authority from the bad press and will help Google understand that this bad press is no longer as important thus... move it down in rankings.

It can be done... Good Luck ;)

[chowell]

What you need, if you don't have time to do everything the previous posters have suggested, is Reputation Management services.

This essentially boils down to posting enough positive information on your website and promoting it, that it pushes the negative stuff off the 1st page of results.

Caution: If you do this yourself, make sure you're not just making crap up that you submit. People can easily spot fakes and it will just get more negative publicity.

[risk]

All good stuff above, what you should be doing for your website anyway and not just for your company name keyword!

Present company excluded, However I think it's great that companies who provide bad services are outed and slagged off and suffer in the SERPS.
More power to the complainers!

You often hear that when building links using 'commenting' to provide positive contribution, however negative contributions are taken equally as seriously by google (and the public).

If companies provide bad services, I'd recommend all the above tactics to damage their Internet reputation..and more....!

We are currently taking some solicitors to court for professional negligence.........after the case is heard.......win or lose! there's no smoke without fire and the fire can burn for a long time on the Internet!

[qh4dotcom]

Google "Reputation Management" and there are several companies there whose job is to push down the negative results off the 1st page of Google.

Also you might want to visit the rip-off report and complaintsboard and reply to the allegations...say something positive about your client...if there was a misunderstanding that led to the complaint, then clear it up.

[ericajoieake]

I have a client who has a specific problem. When you go to google and type in their "company name" their company does pop up as #1. The problem is Rip-Off Report is #2 and compaintsboard is #3. The 2 complaints were both from the same customer from a long time ago.

My immediate job is to fix the google "company name" search so those 2 complaints no longer exist on their first page search. Does anyone have a suggestion how to do this?

thanks,
Donny


I also encounter this kind of problem before, well honestly this kind of problem is not an easy task all you have to do is to assign a few SEO to create a post or blog and to optimize it to be able to replace the rankings of that negative publicity of your site. And it may take a month or several months.

[Jenie0109]

answering back is sometimes a good way to earn again your good reputation. To clear things up if its not really true..

[Dr Britt Borden MD]

Search the term "Internet Reputation Management" to get the name of companies that can handle this; none of them will do it cheaply.

[MayaLocke]

Get incoming links and use the company/brand name to link to it. Its typically very easy to rank #1 for a company brand. Create profiles of the company on business sites, as they typically will rank well as well. More content will push the bad search results further down in the search results.

[Dr Britt Borden MD]

Donny, I have a friend who has the exact same problem; he has hired an "Internet Reputation Management" company to handle the problem; here is some of what they are doing:
You said you have a "Company Name" problem well one thing that these "Internet Reputation Management" people are doing is buying domains like:
Company-Name.com Company-Name-Widgets.com Company-Name-Products.com
Then they build simple web sites (the are using wordpress blogs) which heavily use the keywords throughout the site following good SEO techniques. You can also blog and comment on news etc. web pages and then when something comes up relatively high you can link to it using your "Company Name" keywords to make those commented pages more relavent. Part of what you want to do here is provide pages with a good image of "Company Name", but part of what you want to do is provide pages that are chaff and clutter. Also try simple things like FaceBook and MyPages and LinkedIn pages and link to these.
One of these Internet Reputation Management" companies will charge you $1500 to $5000 or more for 3 to 6 months or more depending on the problem.

[Spence]

Hi Donny,

I think this has been mentioned, especially by Feydakin, but release a few press releases, articles and do some simple social bookmarking.

For example, I have managed to capture ten places in google for my own site by simply releasing a few press releases, setting up a Squidoo and Bt Tradespace account (uk) and doing some articles.

If you release a few PR's to some of the free press release sites, they hold a lot of power in Google and you will hopefully manage to knock these sites down a little.

I think someone has mentioned answering back, quite a hard thing to do but if you can might be worth it.

[Dr Britt Borden MD]

Hi Donny,

I think this has been mentioned, especially by Feydakin, but release a few press releases, articles and do some simple social bookmarking.

For example, I have managed to capture ten places in google for my own site by simply releasing a few press releases, setting up a Squidoo and Bt Tradespace account (uk) and doing some articles.

If you release a few PR's to some of the free press release sites, they hold a lot of power in Google and you will hopefully manage to knock these sites down a little.

I think someone has mentioned answering back, quite a hard thing to do but if you can might be worth it.

This is all good advice by Spence; as far as the answering back issue, I would say this: this could be a real good thing, but it could also be a real bad thing. Answering back might show that the company is reputable, but it might also just create a lot more bad results; this is an issue that you must gauge; if you are not sure then it is probably better to not answer back and merely push down the negative results. You must realize here that you are both pushing down and diluting bad results.

[nickseo]

This is all good advice by Spence; as far as the answering back issue, I would say this: this could be a real good thing, but it could also be a real bad thing. Answering back might show that the company is reputable, but it might also just create a lot more bad results; this is an issue that you must gauge; if you are not sure then it is probably better to not answer back and merely push down the negative results. You must realize here that you are both pushing down and diluting bad results.

I do agree, there are certain times when i read the comments editors have made if its a product or service that i want to use and there isnt that much of a choice, but if the markets saturated id rather move on to somewhere else than waste time reading about something that doesnt have 100% good feedback. - bit sad i know, butsuch is the availability of choice online hey!

[SteveGerencser]

This is all good advice by Spence; as far as the answering back issue, I would say this: this could be a real good thing, but it could also be a real bad thing. Answering back might show that the company is reputable, but it might also just create a lot more bad results; this is an issue that you must gauge; if you are not sure then it is probably better to not answer back and merely push down the negative results. You must realize here that you are both pushing down and diluting bad results.

It is "never" a bad thing to respond to legitimate complaints..

The trick is to respond appropriately and not many people can do that.. At lest not very well..

[williamc]

One of these Internet Reputation Management" companies will charge you $1500 to $5000 or more for 3 to 6 months or more depending on the problem.

You are giving only one small part of what reputation management is all about. Yes, they improve your good listings placements to "push down" the bad listings. The better rep managers go after the bad listings and make them remove them as well and some places even have a 80-90% success rate doing so. Over the long haul this is what is going to help the most. There are a number of methods used to do this as well as the part that "pushes down" the bad listings.

[tangeray]

I believe they may be complains by a competitor. Create a bunch of accounts with your Brand as the name. Social networks are best: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube are the largest. Yahoo Local listings, Google will all push the junk off the SERPs