Real long story short, a few years back a friend of mine went through a bad nasty divorce and made some enemies. A "hate/slanderous/false" free site was put up that basically was set up to destroy his reputation. Well, recently (not sure why out of the blue) if you did a search for his name or lical business in Google, this site appears in fourth spot on page one. Now my question, any suggestion or tips on how to outrank this site. Any contact that I tried to make with "Author" or "free site" has not been responded too. Thanks in advance
I am not at all an expert on legal matters but I personally don't think “outranking” that site would do any good to protect your friend's reputation. Even if you succeed in doing it, the site will appear back somewhere at top in SERPs after sometime. The ideal solution, I figure, would be to take the site down completely. Can't you simply file an anti-defamation suit against those guys? Here's something that might help you do it, or in any case understand why and how to do it – http://www.optimizesmart.com/protect-your-reputation-through-anti-defamation-clause/. I don't find it surprising either that those people are not responding to your messages. And the reason this site is visible all of a sudden now is most probably its SEO has been revamped. Well, all this is just me but I hope it helps you anyway.
Your friend should contact Google Business support ASAP, describe the situation, confirm that he is really he is, that he hasn't any connections to that site. It will be removed from SERP. Last few month a saw similar topics, all of them was positively resolved via support... Good luck!
Just a update, recently bought his name as a dot com with hosting. We have written a basic "about us" page, and have been building backlinks to this page. Hoping this works, any other tips or suggestions?