Alternatives to Negative Search Result Suppression

People have short memories, but online memory is indelible. If your online reputation has been damaged by negative articles, bloggers, government records or negative reviews, you may have a few options.
1.    If it’s a real problem, fix it and work to improve reputation using pure public relations techniques. If it’s a company having the reputation problem a CEO willing to quickly, publicly, and sincerely apologize for a misstep is often a best first step. It adds a human face to the solution and can work to transform public opinion. Apology can be powerful medicine. Corporations are often perceived as bloodless sharks, but regret is an emotion people can understand and empathize with. 
But sometimes the problem is attached to the CEO him or herself. If the problem is with the CEO or the Directors, a company spokesman is a better choice for a human face. The Chairman of the Board, retired CEO, or other high-profile stakeholder are good alternatives as well. 
Construction of a special website to respond to a major crisis is often advised. For example, BP created www.bpresponse.org to act as a single online focus point for communications about the 2005 refinery fire in Texas City. Both BP employees and the public could access the site. News updates and statements, as well as contact information were all accessible from one focused point.

2.    If the problem is a blog post or other online posting, and you can work with the author to get it removed without making the problem worse, do so. We have had clients with internet reputation management problems that attempted to contact the author only to be unhappily surprised when the blogger appended their plea to the original offending article. This caused a refresh of the page, additional comments. Google’s highly efficient search engine responded by immediately promoting the negative to the top of page one for the companies name compounding the problem.

3.    Legal remedies for reputation management are expensive and time consuming. A valid court order can get Google to remove a search result from their search engine, but it doesn’t remove the offending website – it just doesn’t show up in Googles search results anymore. 
But remember, bringing legal action against an online author can bring unwanted attention that can cause a negative search result to rise (see #2 above). If you’d like to explore legal reputation options, talk to an attorney, but also talk to a reputation management company before proceeding. Many of our clients are attorneys that made the mistake of bringing legal action against someone only to make the problem worse in terms of search engine visibility.

4.    If it’s a negative reputation problem that cannot be removed or you’d like to avoid bringing any more attention to via public relations, and you just want to be suppressed, move straight to online reputation management. Moving a negative to the bottom of page one for a key phrase, or better yet to page five, can effectively make it invisible because so few people ever search past page one.

Negative suppression involves the creation of reputation control points such as press releases, specially designed websites, online profiles, social media, video, positive articles, true reviews, and more. Then using aggressive search engine optimization to cause these results to rise and occupy the coveted first page of search results in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines.