It’s a nightmare for a business owner to discover bad search results associated with his brand’s name. Where you toil to make your customers happy and satisfied with your products and services there are few who are never happy and use the internet to write bad or negative about your brand and vent out their frustration and dissatisfaction.
But, that undoubtedly hurts your brand’s reputation online.
People use the internet to research your brand or company and make their decisions based on what they find online.
Needless to say that when they find negative information they make negative assumptions about your brand.
Hence, it is necessary to have a positive online reputation. And to do that you need to remove negative information from the internet about your brand.
Though removing anything from the internet is not easy once it is live there.
But, fortunately, there are some ways to remove negative information from the internet.
Also, it helps when you publish positive content which is beneficial for your brand’s reputation.
Essentially there are two ways of doing it.
- Removal
- Suppression (also known as deep linking or burying down)
Which is the Better Way to Remove Negative Information from the Internet?
The answer to that question depends on three-four factors.
- Whether the negative content is associated with your name or your company’s name?
- Where that negative information has been published viz., on own media or on a different website.
- What is the popularity of the website where the negative information is live?
- What is your stand against that negative information? Whether you have offered to solve the issue or your dissatisfied customers are not ready to remove those negative posts.
Based on the answers the strategy to Remove negative information from the internet is built.
Based on the results and your requirement you may also choose to suppress the links containing negative information.
Suppressing the links bury them down and they don’t appear in the first few pages of the search results.
Below we will discuss both ways to remove negative information from the internet i.e., complete removal and suppression.
Removing Negative Information Completely
The first thing you want when you see a negative content, defamatory remark, or a bad review associated with your name or your brand’s name is to remove it completely so that it never appears again on the internet searches.
Removing a link containing negative content about you would certainly dissociate your name with it and people will not see anything bad about you on the internet.
Of course, it’s the best way but it is very difficult to do.
Because, in most cases, these negative reviews, defamatory remarks, or negative content are on the websites you don’t control.
If the negative content is on a page or website you control it is very easy to remove it.
How to Remove Negative Information from Third Party Websites
Removing content from third-party websites is not easy.
However, in many cases removal of negative content from a third-party website can be done without any assistance. There are several ways to do this:
Contact the website owner and ask them directly
This is a direct approach for the removal of negative content from a third-party website.
For instance, you can ask a blogger to remove their posts which talk negatively about your brand or you.
If you can explain why they should remove it in a proper manner with valid points, they may reconsider their stance on the negative content they have posted and remove it.
Contact Google to remove sites/pages that violate their policies
If any third party website has published content that is vindictive, defamatory, derogatory, or about any sensitive financial or personal information you can report it to Google and get it removed from Google Searches.
Google de-indexes such information from their search results because they violate their user privacy policy guidelines.
Similarly, anything that can be used to commit fraud like Credit Card Numbers, Email Addresses, Bank Account Numbers, etc., and offensive images or videos also violates the Google Privacy Policy Guidelines and can be reported to Google for removal.
But, here one thing is important to note that even Google de-indexes those pages from the search but the pages on those third party website would still be there and people who run a search on that website or having exact URL address of that page may still be able to see that information which Google De-indexed from Search.
Legal proceedings against negative and unlawful content
In cases like online defamation, discrimination, copyright infringement, and other illegal content you can go to court and file a suit, and if you win you can submit a copy of the court orders for the removal of the negative content in question. However, this is a very tedious and long way.
Sometimes, it costs thousands of dollars in legal fees and could even draw more attention to the negativity by the news media you were trying to remove in the first place.
You should carefully think about the cost, hassle, and the risks of taking legal action before you actually go for it. You can find more information about removing the legally unlawful content from Google here.
How to Remove Negative Information from Your Own Web Pages and Social Media Channels
People may also write bad about you or your brand on the social media channels you have.
Or they can also write bad about you on Yelp, Google My Business Page, Facebook, Youtube Channels, etc.
If you have such a case you need not worry, all you have to do is respond to those comments in a professional and helpful way.
You can also try to update your business profile information to be more positive and interesting.
For instance, changing address on your Google My Business page would give you a new address and the old reviews would be gone if you delete the previous address.
In more complex and out of hand situations you can permanently delete your profile from these channels and get rid of the negative information.
But it is important to note that some websites will still keep the customer reviews public, even after deleting the profiles and pages.
So, the best way is to respond to those negative comments in a professional and helpful way and resolve the issues and then ask the customers who have posted those to remove them.
Removing Negative Content from Own Website
Some businesses offer their customers a dedicated page on their website for feedback and testimonials.
Most of the e-Commerce business also offers the customers to write about their experiences of the products they buy from those websites.
This helps other prospective customers to know about others’ experiences with the product and helps them make their purchase decision.
If you also have such a page and people write bad about you or your brand on them then you can remove them from your page.
But, the best way is to respond in a professional and helpful way and try resolving the issue of the customer.
Keep your customers happy and encourage them to resolve their complaints with your customer care team through email or phone communication.
Don’t let them go unhappy and then write bad about you in public forums.
Remember, 71% of the people make their purchase decisions after reading the reviews of others.
Bad reviews would certainly make those customers go away from your website and buy from a competitor website.
Don’t lose your customers because of unresolved issues and negative information written by others on the internet.
Suppressing the Negative Information
So far we discussed removing the negative information from the internet if it is on your own website, social media pages you own, or from third party websites and review sites.
But, most of the time it is not easy to remove negative information from the internet. Because, it is very time consuming, and requires legal proceedings and becomes very expensive.
So people go for the other way i.e., hide that negative content which is harming their online reputation.
This method is the Suppression of negative information.
Suppress (or Bury) the Negative Content with Reverse SEO
The other option for minimizing the reputation damaged by negative content is with link suppression.
Some specific SEO techniques help do this. And the SEO techniques for suppressing the negative links are known as Reverse SEO.
With this technique instead of removing the web pages containing negative content, new pages are created with more search-friendly content.
These pages gain higher ranks on the search engines for those specific keywords. And the pages with the negative content lose their ranks from the first few pages of the search engine results.
The advantage of using this method of negative content suppression is not only effective at removing negative content from the first few pages of search results, but it also works to strengthen your online branding and/or promote your business in a positive light on search engines.
The majority of people only visit the first few links returned in search results. As you create SEO-focused content, your page rises to the top of the search ranks, while other pages move down.
If you can push negative content beyond the third page of search results, it’s likely that consumers won’t even see it.
Suppressing the Bad Links
There are plenty of ways to suppress or bury the bad links on search results, all of which are very manageable and very effective:
- Setting up new social media profiles and making and keeping them active so that search engines show them in the search results.
- Starting a company blog and posting excellent content regularly which drives organic traffic on to it.
- Publishing other types of media, like podcasts, images, and videos.
- Starting your youtube channel and create meaningful videos that garner visitors’ attention.
- Optimizing content you already have on the web, like pages on your company site.
- Creating more backlinks for your own website so that it always has a better search engine ranking.
- Become a thought leader by publishing expert advice in professional forums.
- Invite guest posts on your company blog which are relevant to your industry. This will drive more traffic and more variety of content which would attract more people to it.
But, still, you should keep in mind that the links which you have suppressed by reverse SEO may reappear if there are more hits on that page.
Search engine algorithm changes can also affect the rankings of the pages and may result in the reappearance of the suppressed content.
Online Reputation Management Services to Remove and Suppress Negative Content
A number of internet privacy and reputation management companies now offer services to help people and businesses get bad and unwanted information removed from the internet, either by:
- Complete removal of unwanted content from the website(s) that published it, or
- Suppression of the negative search results on Google, Bing, and other conventional web search engines.
The majority of the Online Reputation Management companies go for the Suppression method. Because it is easy to do with SEO techniques and results are seen in a couple of weeks or months.
But the suppression method is not a permanent solution and those links can reappear if that website starts to get more visitors on it.
Whereas there are very few companies that go for complete removal of the negative content. Complete removal of the negative content is time taking process and obviously, it is a little expensive way.
But, the plus point is that you get complete removal of the negative content and it will never reappear again.
Hence, based on your requirement, situation, budget, and keeping future perspective in mind you should choose companies for your Online Reputation Management.
Conclusion
The Internet has become the first point of reference for almost everything. People make their decisions for purchase, hiring, dating, employment, admission, etc., based on the information they read over the internet.
Bad reviews and negative content about a company or a person on the internet is surely going to hurt his online reputation.
Nobody wants a bad name for sure and they try their level best to remove the negative content about them from the internet.
Everyone doesn’t have the knowledge, time, and expertise to remove that negative information.
They hire companies or experts who provide services to protect people’s privacy by monitoring and removing their information from people search and public database sites.
These companies also provide other “information removal” services to get things like negative (defamatory) content, bad reviews, court cases, negative press, revenge porn, leaked videos, and a plethora of other types of content that people don’t want to show up in search results removed from the internet or hidden on web searches.
Choose your Online Reputation Management agency carefully. Make everything clear regarding the payment terms, time-frame, monthly or quarterly reports. Ask them whether they are going for Suppression or complete removal.
PS: Digitoly is a globally recognized Online Reputation Management Company has successfully served clients from Colombia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Mexico, India, Hungary, Belgium, Bangladesh, Ukraine, United States of America, Bolivia, Israel, and Germany. If you want to have something removed from the internet you can get in touch with us by using the form below.
