How to Bury a Negative Online Comment??

Hi

3 years ago someone wrote something uncomplimentary about a friend of mine, using his name in the Title (and repeatedly in the body) of a blog post (on a free blogspot blog).

The blog hasn't had new content added to it in 2 years - though the blogger had been quite active when he was maintaining it over two years. There are no backlinks to the post, the page has a 2PR.

My friend has many other listing on social networks (linkedin, facebook etc) but this post always lands first in the SERPS - he doesn't know how long this has been the case as he has never checked his own name online.

Can anyone make a suggestion about how to get this post off the first page of the SERPS?

Many thanks

 

try some links to other places with the anchor text -exactly their name
it should easily put them above that page

 

complain to google about defamation of character, mention libel lawsuits. There's a button on the blogspot blog itself.

 

do offsite marketing with same anchor text

 

There is a recent post in Matt Cutts blog on this subject. As far as he stated Google won't do much about it.

Your best bet is to keep on creating forum profiles, social website accounts, free blogspot blogs, etc and get some back links to them. Try to find high PR forums and create accounts with his real name and add his name in all the available fields.

 

thanks guys - have spent the last 2 hours trying to get back links to the other sites below the one we want to bury using his name as anchor text.

How long do you think it should be before we can tell if this is working?

Thanks for your help.

 

log into the admin section before the search engines crawl it especially if it is very Spammy....

Comments are good as long as they are not negative but I don't think I would worry so much if it is a bad comment and last poster underneath that poster starts commenting otherwise...............

 

You should contact the web site owner (if you know who is it) and explain the situation.
Or....hire a web hacker

 

hi Aaron111

The comment is on someone else blog and its 3 years old. The blog is no longer maintained and no one comments on it anymore. The problem is that its the very first result and the negative comment is in the title so it is very obvious.

the blog owner is a nutter so its not worth going there.

 

he could "befriend" others with powerful blogs and just put several new posts above them easily enough? if they linked from those posts to the social profiles you'd probably get them up there too.

or they could pretend to be writing about a different person or org of the same name.

if you PM me the keywords I'll have a quick look, we could probably do this in an afternoon if we had the right blogs.

 

This is called brand or reputation management and basically involves hiring a skilled SEO/Internet Marketing firm or individual to sort out for you.

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

Contact the SE's Legal team and ask for their help. If you go thru Support, it will get lost or they bring up "First Admendment Rights". What every you do, stop clicking on it. The traffic is what's keeping it at the top.

Next, start using Blog and Forum with their name in it. On each, use their name at the front of the <Title> and Description.

In addition, add to your Signature Links their name as well.

If this does not help, then you are under a SEO attack and you will need to go to an SEO Pro that does Reputation Management.

But first go to Google and Yahoo on this. They don't like it either.

 

As always... for every backlink you create to the other 'friendly' pages you are trying to help rank, make sure that:

1) it is a followed link and
2) the page where you are placing the link IS in fact in Google's index.

NOFOLLOW links or links from pages not in Google's index are not going to help you rank at Google.

And as others said, Google is likely not going to do anything about it. Your friend either needs to 1) ignore it and not worry about it, 2) invest a lot of time and energy trying to bump them off of page 1 back 30 or 40 positions into the SERPs, or 3) get a lawyer if he even has grounds for some type of libel or defamation suit.

Unfortunately that is time/energy/money that he could have spent on his own site AND it's something that he'll have to continue to do going forward even after the post is buried.

 

4 ) Hire an online reputation management company.

 

Just like stated above, you'll have more success if you hire help.

 

Don't you think it will be better to contact him and talk it out? I mean there maybe a reason for writing about you in the first place.

All the same that is deformation of character and it is not good. Reporting him to Google will not do any help. Google don't act on individual cases.

 

You can submit some articles to the major Article directories. Be sure to use his name in the Bio or Author section. I sent out 5-6 articles a year or so back, the first several pages in the serps for my name are all the article directories. (actually linkedin is first).

 

How about you offer free links to anyone who will put something negative on their site using the guys name in the title and content and when they all get indexed you write to him asking for removal of his negative comments in return for yours!

 

heh, I like the way you think lol....

Nigel

 

Depends how much effort or expense its worth your friend going to to fix this.

You could buy exact match domains for his name if they are available, ie firstnamelastname.com, .net and .org

Then either have him put personal websites on them, or create totally fake people with the same name. Build a few links to each and you will easily get them all on the first page assuming its just a non-common name. Depends how how up the serps the negative post is - by the sounds of it its the 1st or 2nd result so you're going to need to try and push 9 pages in front of it. I'd try and do a few exact match domains, and then go for profile pages on twitter, facebook, bebo etc too.