What should you do when the top few search engine results for your company include one or more listings that are blatantly negative? Articles that are wrong, biased, misleading or worse?

One approach is to contact your lawyer. If the person behind the negative listing has lied or defamed you or your company, you may have a case for defamation. But litigation is costly. Moreover, the culprit in question may not necessarily have defamed you in the legal sense. They may have simply published an item of ‘free speech’ that is negative, but not strictly defamatory.

Another approach is to complain to the search engines. But they’re unlikely to do anything unless you can show them that the negative listing is unlawful or the result of ‘gaming’ the search engines.

A more practical approach is to beat the negative listing at their own game: use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to push down their listing in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Now, as with anything to do with SEO, you can take a ‘white hat’, ‘black hat’ or ‘grey hat’ approach. A ‘black hat’ approach is to try to game the search engines; a ‘white hat’ approach is to follow the ‘rules’ i.e. the rules of relevance and authority; and a ‘grey’ hat approach is somewhere in between the two.

The problem with black and grey approaches is that while you may be able to get rid of the negative listing in the short term… in the long term you run the risk of losing your own listing altogether and damaging your reputation among the search engines.

This is rarely a risk worth taking when dealing with your company and/or brand name and main website.

On that basis, a ‘white hat’ approach is the only approach I recommend for optimizing your main site AND for defending against threats to your search engine positioning and/or reputation.

And what if you actually rank highest for your company name anyway, and are simply trying to get rid of a negative listing that sits BELOW your listing? In that case, it’s not so much a matter of optimizing your main site or page any further… but to get other favorable listings to rise above, and push out, the negative listing.

One way to do that is to build and optimize alternative websites… but that’s likely to take a long time and a lot of effort on your part. This is because, among other things, the search engines tend to be slow to rank brand new domains highly in the SERPs.

Here’s a much easier - and more effective - way suggested by Aaron Shear: build a presence on various popular social media sites.

The search engines tend to rank the popular social media sites highly. Therefore, by establishing a page on all the major social media sites - Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and so on - you’ll have a shot at getting those pages ranked… and ranked higher than the negative listing you’re trying to get off the first few pages of results.

The key, of course, is to put some unique, compelling content on those pages, and attract in-bound links to those pages from authoritative sites. But it may not be as difficult as you think. Placing videos on YouTube, for example, is something you might be interested in doing anyway, and will likely to have many benefits (in terms of traffic and conversions) other than ousting those negative sites from the top listings.

Indeed, building a presence on the popular social media sites is a recommended traffic and SEO strategy and, by including links to your main site, can also aid in achieving or maintaining a high ranking for your main site.

It’s certainly your best bet in terms of getting rid of those negative listings that just don’t seem to go away.

Source: Aaron Shear, “Maintaining Your Company’s Image in the SERPs”, Search Engine Watch, November 4, 2008