Overcoming uncomplimentary comments
7th August 2008
By Chris Rand
What happens when you type your company’s name into Google (like many people will, every day) and beneath the first result (which is your website, isn’t it?) is a result with a title like “[Your Company] is rubbish - don’t deal with them”. This is something any company can face, and it’s worth knowing what do do about it.
How to Combat Complaints Sites in Google on Search Engine Journal discusses this issue. I was approached recently by a friend whose TV rentals company had exactly this problem. The first Google result for their name was their company’s site. The second result was something highly uncomplimentary, written by a semi-literate idiot in the comments section on one of those terrible empty local business directories. It rather jumped out of the Google results page though. Our technique for resolving this worked a treat: we simply went to the business directory and wrote our own comment about the company, but written in such a way that Google would choose this page to display as a result instead of the uncomplimentary comment page. It took a week or two before the nice comment replaced the earlier one as the second result in Google.
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Georgia Jenkins wrote on 7 August 2008:
You have given me an idea to check on programs I’m in — and another great idea of the necessity to keep articles and ratings professional. That is what your defence probably entailed — thanks for the info.
Georgia Jenkins