How to Deal with Negative Search Engine Results
Glen Allsopp / 
21 Comments / 
February 1st, 2008 / 
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Negative search engine results pages (SERP’s) can be a huge turn-off for people looking to use a company’s products or services. In fact, it’s estimated that 40% of people who do see a negative search engine result are put off completely and simply won’t use a company.
These are not search results that you aren’t ranking for, but search results that revolve around your brand name, staff names, product names or even service names. They tend to be ranking highly (otherwise they wouldn’t be much of an issue) and are negative in one way or another, something no business owner likes to have.
Examples
Before I dive in and explain the best ways to clear these things up, I thought I would share some examples of what you might not want to see.
1. Paypal
Paypal are a very large, eBay owned payment processor and are incredibly well known. Services like these have to be trusted if they are going to handle your money, yet there’s a high ranking website named ‘Paypal Sucks‘.
2. Telkom
Telkom are a major communications provider in South Africa (a bit like BT in England) and are a heavy criticised company throughout the county. A quick search on their name provides an unflattering micro-site named Hellkom.
How to Deal with Negative Results
1. Start Creating New Pages to Rank Higher
This one is simple and probably the most obvious. If somebody is ranking highly for a product or service name, create extra pages on your own domain. You should have the authority and relevance for those key terms so if you are creating more relevant pages (such as a Product FAQ) then those should start ranking higher as well.
This is not removing the negative search engine results but it is pushing them further out of sight.
2. Create New Pages / Profiles on Other Sites
Not only can you get more positive pages ranking on your own site but you can also get pages on other sites ranking well. Such ways to do this could be creating a lens on Squidoo and a page on Hubpages then sending some links back to them.
Profiles sites also tend to work well such as MySpace, Wikihow or even Twitter. These rank well because the domains have some authority but if the negative results have authority they aren’t going to rank on their own.
3. Respond to the Negative Issue if Possible
I’m sure if Paypal or Telkom got in touch with their negative counter-parts, a simple plea wouldn’t be enough to get the site owners to take down their domains. However, if the issue is a blog or forum post, try and respond to it in a professional manner and help the person if you can.
This is for the simple fact that one day, somebody will probably find the page anyway so if there’s something positive and you are showing good customer service then you might just save yourself from another person being put off what you have to offer.
4. Create your Own Negative Results
This might seem cheeky to some or a little crazy, but it works. Simple as that. Basically the thought process behind this is that people look for negativity before trusting to use a service. Therefore, terms like ‘Company problems’, ‘Company issues’ may be part of their search vocabulary.
To counteract this, you can create positive articles that cover those negative keywords i.e. ‘Company Name: No Problem lowering Prices’. If you get a little creative you can apply this to many keywords and really protect yourself from those inquisitive searchers.
5. Be a Better Company
We all understand that companies have their critics, who doesn’t. Often, those critics pick up on pesky details that is more their problem rather than with a company or its services. Other times, you have to be honest with yourself and think whether you could handle certain services or situations better to benefit the customer.
If you are getting a lot of people complaining about something, solve the issue and get back to them. Be transparent in your dealings or the negative search engine results you have now will only continue to get worse.
Negative search engine results are just one issue, you can find more in our post about ‘8 Types of Reputation Management Issues‘.
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Nice points Glen:
#1) I would add “sub-domains” to get additional pages ranked quickly.
#2) Profile pages / LinkedIn = great profile page that ranks really well, if you are trying to rank for a name.
Thanks for the post Glen!
I think your points were included (1 with one, 2 with two). Not specifically though so some good points.
Another one I thought about just now is sending links to positive pages on other sites so I’ll add that one in the future.
How aggressively would you link from ’said’ domain, to increase the likelihood of your profile pages ranking?
(or..would the same results be obtained from just linking internal pages of your site, provided that they carry some decent link juice)
To be honest I don’t really get clients to link to profile pages, maybe to a blog with one article on it or some positive press from around the web.
Just try to get some backlinks to the profile pages themselves either from article sites or sometimes even directories, does just enough.
Confirmed - thanks Glen!
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Hey Glen, great post.
I would add removing negative news articles by promoting other articles from the same site. Since Google will show only two pages per domain (except for the site links and universal search results), it is enough that you link to two other articles on the offending site to remove the bad rep page…
Hi Glen,
As a South African, I’m a little concerned that your information about recovering from negative results might be read by someone from Telkom. The Hellkom site is far more informative than the official Telkom site.
How does one recover from a negative Digg? Like this one: Worst ADSL Offering in the World
Hi Michael I’m going to be doing a post on this sometime in the future
How to deal with a Google Bomb? I was on a site today - a company that may offer a job today - and if you Google certain sex-phrases you find the company. What can you do when this is the case, make your own google bomb and point elsewhere?
Find out why the people did the Google bomb in the first place and see if you can resolve the situation. I have to assume they are quite rare sex terms otherwise they would be getting a hell of a lot of traffic for those?
It’s hard to say much more without knowing the actual situation. Definitely try to deal with whoever did the ‘google bomb’ in a professional manner i.e. go to the souce
“share your masterbation videos” is one of the 2 that I saw. When you select to repeat the search with the omitted results included you see that there was someone that created a bunch of links with that phrase.
I just LOVE #4… creating your own negative search results. Brilliant!
Thanks Brett, It’s really like it as well as it’s a little different
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Excellent post, discussing an important marketing area that is often overlooked. Rather than thinking there’s nothing you can do about negative publicity, these are practical and easy tips to maintain control of your online presence.
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