'Digital Dive:' How to Use Reverse SEO to Suppress Negative Content in Search Engines

One day, John decides to leave a one-star review on your Yelp profile. Unfortunately, you lack enough five-star reviews to counterbalance this extremely negative one. What do you do?

You could simply delete the profile, but because your team is working to gain positive reviews in the future, that's something you want to avoid. Alternatively, you could try to lower the visibility of the profile in Google by making sure that your established Avvo, Justia and Findlaw profiles always rank on top of it. How? With reverse SEO

Let's say you have an unhappy client who writes a blog on which she has published a post ranting about your “dreadful” client service. As the blog has built some authority over the years, the article is ranking high in the search engines for queries such as “[your firm name] client service.”

In your attempt to have the post removed, you contacted the blogger, attempted to make amends over the service complaint and offered to send her a $50 gift card to her favorite store; however, she was not interested in your outreach and refused to remove the post. In this case, reverse SEO may be an appropriate solution.

Reverse SEO Techniques

As mentioned in the second example above, the most effective way to handle negative content online is to endeavor to have it removed entirely. If you can make that happen, kudos to you, and you can forego reverse SEO.

However, if removing bad content is unfeasible, you can apply different reverse SEO techniques to reach your goal indirectly.

Reverse SEO lowers the search engine ranking searches, thereby hiding it from the public eye.

Statistically speaking, more than 90% of all searchers never move past the first page of Google or Bing. Therefore, content listed on the second or third pages is unlikely to gain any traction or attention, and that's exactly what we want to achieve.

SEO Best Practices

1. Create positive content, publish and promote it online using the following: a. Established high-authority websites. Contact sites with a strong established profile and offer to write a free and high-quality guest post for their blog. The post is likely going to rank in Google without requiring significant promotional SEO effort. b. Wikipedia. Create a Wikipedia entry for your organization. Wikipedia pages are also very likely to outrank other content. c. Social media profiles and Web 2.0s. Create pages and accounts on the most popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. Post on authoritative Web 2.0s used for blogging such as Blogger, Tumblr and Medium. Make sure to stay active on these sites and post fresh content on a regular basis. d. Videos. Videos, especially those uploaded to YouTube, have a very high probability of ranking in organic SERPs.
2. Create a list of all the existing third-party pages, posts and videos that endorse your firm, but currently rank below the targeted negative content you want to suppress.
3. Apply the same white-hat SEO techniques you use already to successfully rank your firm's website to provide the newly created and the existing third-party content with a ranking boost, so it eventually outranks the targeted negative content.

Negative SEO

Policy violations can lead to your website to be penalized or even de-listed by search engines.

For example, Google Webmaster Guidelines clearly states that if you participate in link schemes by pointing links to your own site to manipulate its rankings in search results, Google may take manual action against it.

“Manual action” is another term for a huge drop in rankings, something every webmaster wants to avoid. Purposely directing negative links to someone else's site called “negative SEO” is also a violation of search engine policies that could trigger a manual penalty against your site.

While some agencies and individuals engage in this practice as part of their reverse SEO campaigns, we strongly recommend you not purposely cause harm to another site's rankings, as it will have a negative impact and may pose a legal risk to the firm.

Finding the Right Balance

Finally, to remain credible, you should keep in mind that reverse SEO means finding the right balance between removing or suppressing a client complaint and falling into disrepute.

Simply put, you can avoid having to use reverse SEO if there are nothing but five-star reviews for your firm's services online. The best way, of course, is to satisfy as many of clients as possible, so they don't feel the urge to speak ill of you and/or the firm, in the first place.

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Marguerita Cheng is CEO of Blue Ocean Global Technology, which helps organizations make optimal technology and marketing resource allocations. They serve clients and partner agencies in 40+ countries. She may be reached at [email protected] and 301-502-5306.