Q and A: How do we remove bad publicity about us from the top of the SERPs?

Dear Kalena...

I have the opposite situation that most people have. What are some specific things we can do to avoid popping up at the top of search lists? We had some wrong accusations/unfair press that has since resolved. However, the articles from two years ago continue to be right there, making it difficult to grow and move forward. I truly appreciate your advice and hope you can help me. THANKS!

Karen

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Karen

You don't say whether the negative articles reside on your own site or on sites belonging to 3rd parties, but I'm assuming it's the latter? It's easy to stop certain pages on your own site from being shown in search results. You simply use no-index robots tags on those pages, or block those pages in your robots.txt file.

Having negative press about your company removed from the sites of others is another matter entirely. Have you written to the site owners to request the information be removed? If the negative situation has been resolved, a polite request should do the trick. If that doesn't work and the content of the articles is slanderous or untrue, you could report them to Google.

However, if the content you are concerned about is factual, there's not much you can do except try to outrank the negative content with your own content. Write some pages or blog posts about the issue, addressing it and the way it was resolved, making sure that the pages include the search keywords and phrases triggering the content you are concerned about. Hopefully your content will push the other content down the SERPs and into oblivion.

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