Hey there, I work for a professional who depends on their reputation. A number of years ago, this person was accused of certain things, all of which have since been cleared and the person who brought about the accusations was fined a substantial amount. Basically, the clients of this professional will search for the first or full name (both of which are very unique). Results 1-2 are pages of this person's own site, 3-4 are informative, but 5-6 are 5-year-old media reports of these accusations from small sources. Major media outlets have since issued apologies, but these small firms refuse. This is all in the past, and these firms probably won't care if their articles get devalued on Google, but the potential and current clients of this professional do care, and the professional is tired of explaining that these were unfounded accusations. I am not an SEO expert, but I am familiar with the concept of PR and optimization, but what I want to do is DEVALUE these 2 unfavorable articles for a specific search for this person's name (the owners of which wouldn't care anyway). How would I do this? Would I have to create or reorder a lot of sites to DISPLACE the unfavorable sites so far to push them off the first page? I probably WOULDN'T want to have to have (in the first page, 10 results): ie. 2 pages of his own site, wikipedia, and then 7 results for dummy sites that backlink to and from the first site with whitetext or something (because anyone with any kind of IT background could quickly figure out that this was engineered). Any thoughts appreciated! Thanks!
Yes, exactly. Your chances of just lowering their rankings are slim to none, they must get a lot of strong natural IBLs. I would create a lot of pages from different domain names (sites), which have been indexed in the search engines (especially Google) for a while.
Thanks for your reply. I'm a network admin, btw. When you say "create a lot of pages from different domain names", what do you mean exactly? I of course wouldn't have access to the servers/domains that are already indexed. So the question is, on which sites would I place the links? For example, I could link out of wikipedia's article about this person (which I imagine with ~1000 total results, would by itself be pretty substantial) to good results on page 2, such as bio pages and histories, and bump them up that way?
Make a few new sites with the persons name in the url and you should get them to rank by directory submission and article submission alone. Sign the person up at Digg, seomoz, this forum and V7n forums with his name as the username. Results here Go to squidoo.com and create some lenses with his name as the username eg squidoo.com/johnsmith
Thanks Mad4! I see what you mean. How quickly does this type of change take effect? I hear that deepbot crawls every 30 days, freshbot much more frequently? How would I make sure that their ACTUAL site doesn't get displaced from #1? BL's to it from every page I make?
The what bots? Google spiders sites like this continually. You need posts on the forums to get a good rank for your profile and you need to digg stories on digg as well. If your site doesn't have good links to it then it might get displaced but its unlikely.
Just make sure it gets slightly more promotion than all of the other profile pages you create on forums, etc. With the sandbox effect, you may find it difficult to get pages on new sites to rank well. If you don't mind spending money to make this issue go away, consider paying to have a page put up on a well-linked, high PR page. If this guy's reputation is at stake then it may be better for you to act quickly rather than wait around to gather lots of links. With a linking campaign, you're relying to an extent on other people deciding to link to your site, and that could take a while.
I have had to do this before when a company name had a review in first position in google, people rarely take the time to post good reviews so this was a very negative listing that came up 1st for the company name. You could create one new site and push it for a double listing if done correctly and as Mad said some profiles would be quick and very effective for non competitive terms.
It shouldnt be too difficult. Pick the top ten pages that are favorable and begin linking to these pages with the "keywords" in the anchor text. This should increase rankings for the favorable pages and push the unfavorable pages off the first page.
Thanks for your replies! So I guess I'll be linking with keywords in the anchor text and see what that does. The idea of creating forum accounts (not digg or blogs, etc...) using this person's name and posting with it seems completely blatant and amounts almost to spam? I'm not sure I really understand. For example, I would create the account "Joe Blow" on v7n, and just start posting a regular user? I would add links to good pages in my signature, and with the high PR and IBLs of v7n, I would start ranking the good pages contained in my signature? That seems rather high profile and obvious, no?
It was an extremely good suggestion from Mad and its very effective. You either want to solve this issue or you don't - its not spammy and certainly nicer than trying to take down a competitors website that you don't like.
I've helped a friend (owner of another seo company) before with some of my urls bumping those who slandered his clients off of the top spot. You just need to create a lot of content on urls that Google likes, and the other pages will move back to page 5.