Hi This is slightly unethical but a site has posted some negative press about a site that i am helping out, due to the sites high page ranking it is now ranking as 2nd for the sites name. The information is not slanderous so cannot be removed legally by a lawyer etc. Is there anyway I can remove this ? Can anyone suggest any link farms for me to post the competitor in ? I have posted backlinks with the anchor text Viagra on some higher ranking sites but that does not seem to budge it. Any help much appreciated.
I will recommend doing some positive Press Releases and post rather than negative postings. Its more about reputation and ensuring negative results don't show up in top results for your company name.
There is a process known as reputation management which some companies specialise in, which basically is all about making sure that good reviews do better in serps than bad. But if your response to a 'non-slanderous comment' is to try and blacken your competitor with link farms and viagra spam, then you don't deserve a good reputation.
Online reputation management is all you need. You can use social media optimization to achieve. It would involve pushing down the negative PR web page out of top 10, which ever way you do it.
Without knowing what the site is, it is impossible to advise you. One think that is important is not to give that site traffic from any source. Going negative will only get a negative response. So find a professional repretation management firm and ask them for a review of the issue. You may find it is better just to ignore in unless you have deep pockets of cash and the time for a SEO war.
linkfarms and dubious anchor text will not do it, Google is far too smart for that these days. they maintain that it should be virtually impossible for you to hurt that site's rankings by "normal" means although there are possibly a couple of hardcore blackhat strategies that may or may not still do it, it's debatable. and it's also probably risky for you or your friend client to get involved in. I would agree that it would be much better to be looking at maneuvering other pages or sites between your friend and the problem site.
As suggested - don't go negative. Better off acknowledging the negative press, addressing whatever it is that is negative and turning the whole thing into a positive - demonstrating your clients pro-active, client focussed, timely, polite response to the publicity. That sort of approach will defuse the criticism and can make a positive contribution to your client's reputation. It also provides lots of positive material for blogging - Good Luck
Yeah that was my 2nd though, get "informative" and good pages that use the same term higher up in the rankings moving the bad one down.
I dealt with essentially the same situation at my last job. Someone had made a forum post all about how poorly the company treats some of its employees. This post came up on the first page in Google for our company name. To combat this I ramped up our marketing efforts to try to get listed on websites with even greater authority. Eventually that forum post moved down to the second page as it was replaced with better rankings sites. If it is especially bad negative press, you could speed things up by getting links to a bunch of the pages that show up just below the negative press listing. Chances are that the negative press listing doesn't have much links. So it shouldn't be too hard to push it down in the rankings.