I recently had a client ask me if I can figure out a way to bump down a bad PR article about his company. I am very new to SEO and would like to call this client back and say I can take the job, since any work is money. How ever I'm not sure how to go about it. My first thought is to make 15-20 domains with his companies name in the url and register them to google in hopes of ranking them higher then the site running the article. I made a webpage for him and post and add for his company service that both rank spots 1-2 when searched but the article is ranking 3rd. Only 595,000 results are found when searching for his company name, I made 10+ classified ad's in hopes to push the article down, but only the one that uses the forum title in it's URL has made it to the 2nd spot when searching. So any tips on how to do this would be helpful. Right now I'm going to try free hosting of sub domain names with his companies name and registering them with Google in hopes of bumping the bad PR off the 1st page my goal is to get the bad PR to the 3rd or 4th page if possible, since this company relies on search results for its business or word of mouth this bad PR is really hurting his company. The company has been running for 70 years in their respective area and out of the 70 years has had 7 complaints but this last one, the person he worked for happen to be a respective government official who got the general attorney involved and gave him this bad PR, kinda sad that one person can cripple a company that worked hard for their good name. this guy is a personal friend of mine as well and I know this has been blown way beyond what it should have been, and he has paid the person back, and they got the 24k worth of work for basically free. So I want to help him if I can, just to show the General attorney and the guy who started all this that the little guy will come out on top. How ever because of this bad PR being on the front page he has lost over 150k-200k worth of bids in the last 6 months. So any help is welcome.
this may work better than what are you doing right now ! if the guy you are working for has good reputation (leaving this case aside ), you can ask the satisfied customers to leave testimonial on their website or their Blog. Best of luck with that!
Thanks for the replies, I'll contact him 1st thing in the morning and have his lawyer draft a letter to be sent to Google, along with the letter of retraction being written to be delivered to the general attorney's office. We doubt the GA will retract their statement since it could lead to a law suit, but its something I told him to try. Also Angies list did a report on the story that broke from the GA's website, so maybe I should advise him to contact them as well. Thanks again.
I did something similar for a friend. You can get some Blog posts that might rank real well for the company name rather cheaply. You can also create a myspace page,facebook, angelfire, merchant circle, city data, etc... and these can be optimized to show up well. Just some thoughts....
Some good suggestions already. From a PR perspective, the best way to combat this bad publicity is with good publicity. Issue press releases on new products/services/promotions/meetings/events and then distribute them onPRNews and industry blogs. Also, find some HAPPY customers and post testimonials from them.