Remove Negative Content
Negative content can damage a company or person worse than the author often realizes.
Journalists either knowingly or unknowingly destroy people and brands every day.
After doing a Google search for your name or brand, you may be looking to throw in the towel.
Luckily, there are various ways you (or your company) can have negative content either removed or bumped down in search results.
If you or your company are suffering from damaging content in search engines like Google, Yelp, YouTube or other places, most times the best course of action is to have it pushed down or suppressed.
At MyCleanRep, we have decades of experience suppressing negative content online for nationwide companies, franchises, small business owners, and entrepreneurs.
Here’s a few ways we work to clean up your search results:
1. Removing search results from Google.
You may be able to have specific content removed from Google’s index if it violates their Terms of Service (TOS); however, this isn’t usually the case for business owners so much as it is for celebrities and public figures. While Google may remove some things from search results, it does not remove content from websites themselves. The best course of action here would be to go to the source and request that the content be removed. This is perhaps the most difficult tactic to achieve.
Although highly unlikely the website owner will do it, the first route is always to request that the content be removed from the website.
If that solicits no response, you can send an additional request as a happy medium to have the website owner add a “noindex” tag to the HTML of the web page you want Google to ignore. The meta noindex tag tells search engines to ignore the page without actually taking it away. Some website owners may go for this option so they can keep the content on their website, without it being found in search results when searching for your name.
Whatever you do, never try to bribe or hack your way out of search results. This almost always fails and can cause more backlash and slandering of your name online.
While most content can be removed or suppressed without the use of an attorney, in some cases you may wish to seek the help of your legal team to send a cease and desist letter to the website to remove negative content about you or your brand.
2. Suppressing negative search results.
Suppressing negative search results is by far the most organic, skillful, effective, and white hat reputation management method used by SEO experts and reputation management companies.
How it works:
Completely removing negative search results is very rare, though many business owners think it’s possible.
It’s extremely necessary that you and all parties involved understand how challenging negative online content can be to remove and to have solid brand management solutions in place that aim to prevent these situations from happening.
However, negative search results tend to happen the larger your business is and there may come the time that you need to enlist in a reputation management company to assist in suppression techniques.
Negative search result suppression is actually not an accurate explanation, because what really is happening is promotion.
The first thing a reputation management company is going to do is identify the positives listed in search results below the negatives.
Once a handful of positive search results are identified for your brand, the team will work to optimize those results and promote them, in attempts to increase their search engine rankings, thus suppressing (or bumping down) the negative search results.
If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is.
Although the most common form of negative search result mitigation, suppression techniques take skill and consistency in order to be effective.
MyCleanRep employs only the best suppression experts to ensure efficiency and get your reputation back to squeaky clean online. Contact us today for a FREE negative search result suppression consultation.