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.

Need more than advice? Take a Search Engine Marketing course online

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The Porkers Apologize

If you've been following the whole pork vs boobs saga I posted about yesterday, you might be interested to know that Jennifer Laycock has received a formal apology from Steve Murphy, the Pork Board's CEO.

To their credit, the Pork Board has also made sure that all persons who complained about their approach to The Lactivist, (and there were a LOT of complaints), received a polite, measured email response from Mr Murphy:

"Thank you for your email to the National Pork Board. We appreciate you taking the time to send us an email regarding our communication with "The Lactivist" webstore on CafePress.com about our trademark rights.

It is important to understand that our lawyer’s correspondence to Ms. Laycock was in no way intended to challenge or demean breastfeeding or those who support it. This correspondence is about defending our trademark and the National Pork Board's responsibility to protect pork industry investments on behalf of the 70,000 US pork producers we represent. The Other White Meat® is a pork industry trademark whose value was built slowly and thoughtfully over 20 years, paid for by producer’s hard-earned dollars. Any infringement on that mark would substantially lessen its value and impact for US pork producers.

It’s also important to understand that the National Pork Board cannot pick and choose which infringement challenges it decides to address. We have a responsibility to the industry to challenge all viable infringements (and we do so on a weekly basis) or face the possibility of losing trademark protection and allowing the industry’s valued trademark to become public domain, and thus worthless.

Again, the National Pork Board takes no issue with your important cause. Our interest here was in protecting US pork producer’s investment in The Other White Meat® trademark. We apologize if our response seemed impersonal or harsh; that was not our intent. We will use all feedback that we receive to improve our communication processes in the future. Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention.

Sincerely,


Steve Murphy
Chief Executive Officer
The National Pork Board"

Their choice of legal team may be questionable, but the Pork Board's public relations team seem to know exactly what they are doing. They are in full damage control mode and are doing a jolly good job of mopping up the PR mess before it spreads too far.

As a former PR consultant myself, I tip my hat at them. Having the apology come from the very top is smart. It demonstrates how seriously they are taking the complaints. The wording of the complainant response is polite and restrained. Addressing each and every complainer personally is impressive. I dread to think how many flames they received in their in-box. It would've been tempting to ignore them all and issue some stock standard release. You can bet that somebody has been working overtime since this thing bubbled over.

This whole situation underscores the growing importance of online reputation management. SEO players such as Andy Beal recognized the potential growth in ORM a long time ago. But I wonder how many PR agencies offer this service? You can be sure I'll be adding ORM to my own service offerings this year.

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