Reputation management is more of an art than a science. Although there are some basic principles involved, the search engines are constantly changing the way they rank websites and pages, so it pays to always be on the lookout for creative ways to get your website more attention.
Of course, negative reviews and so-called “scam reports” about your company are something none of us like to see. But these negative reviews and false information can be very hard to take down. So your only option is to help websites that publish positive information about your company to rank better than websites that publish negative information about your company. In that sense, online reputation management is more about burying bad links than it is about helping your company website to rank better.
And the only way to bury negative information far down in the search results is to take control of the positive and neutral information that already exists about you on the internet. For example, here are a few ways you can improve in the art of burying negative links.
1. Create websites
Who says you can only control one official website for your company? One way to create positive links for your company is to create more websites. If you can get those websites to rank well, you’ll be pushing more negative links down in the search results. For example, you can create different websites that deal with different products or different aspects of your business. You could create off-site blogs that often talk about your company and the niche it occupies in the marketplace. And much more.
2. Build links for positive reviews
These days it is pretty much a guarantee that your business has been reviewed somewhere on the internet. And if you’re a big company, it’s probably been reviewed hundreds of times. Take the time to seek out the positive reviews of your company and its products and create linkbuilding campaigns to push those reviews higher in the search results, pushing negative reviews down lower.
3. Build links for neutral information
Not all information about your company online is good or bad, some of it is simply informative and neutral. For example, does your company have a Wikipedia article written about it? If not, write one and promote it by building links to it. Also, take the time to seek out other informational articles about your company, like business listings or conference listings and promote them so that you can bury that negative stuff even deeper.
4. Build links for news stories and press releases
Just like the neutral information that might exist about your company online, there may exist positive/neutral news stories and press releases that mention your company name online. These news stories don’t necessarily have to be about your company, but as long as they mention your company name in a positive/neutral light, they are great candidates for linkbuilding targets. In fact, the more independent information you can get to rank online, the better.
The art of link burying can be difficult and wide-ranging, but it can be worth it if you can manage to push links to negative information about your company down in the ranks by filling the top pages with links to overwhelmingly positive and neutral information.