Is It Possible?

[tbird165]

Hi Everyone,
I have a client and he has has some negative press online in which I wont mention anything about. Anyhow is it possible to lower the rankings of the news sites that come up if you search his name?

He has been in a scandal and a lot of the local online news papers and TV news sites have reported on the scandal and he is asking me is there any SEO techniques that is able to drive down the rankings if you search his name and showing the news stories?

Thanks

[CreativeFlair]

Sign up at good quality business directories like aboutus.org, create lots of social profiles and build links to them, register domain names relating to his name/his business name and put mini sites on them, then build some back links to them. Create a press release and send it out to all the good news sites and press release services.

[Maraun]

You have to essentially flood the SERPS with good or neutral sites for all the search terms that people use to look for this scandal or his name. I guess the news articles are not SEOed at all so it shouldn't be that hard to outrank most of them, but you will need to create quite a lot of content for that.

[John Romaine]

If he's listed in the search engines for being actively involved in a scandal, then chances are he's there for good reason.

If the client expects you to manipulate Google's search results in order to cover up his mess - fire that client IMMEDIATELY.

[timbarker]

It doesn't lower your SE rankings, but it may ruin the reputation of your client. Why not create a press release discussing about the scandal? Clean and remove those possible bad reputation.

[CreativeFlair]

Originally Posted by timbarker

It doesn't lower your SE rankings, but it may ruin the reputation of your client. Why not create a press release discussing about the scandal? Clean and remove those possible bad reputation.

Bad idea, you'll get lots of news sites publishing updated and retaliating articles about it.

Originally Posted by ramone_johnny

If the client expects you to manipulate Google's search results in order to cover up his mess - fire that client IMMEDIATELY.

This is slightly different because it's a scandal. But as a general rule, what you said is too much of a blanket statement. There are competitors and idiots who post crappy reviews all the time, and most of them aren't even true. Best to find out the details before firing someone.

[KuhNoodle]

Well like my Grandad always said, there really isn't such a thing as bad press. His names getting out there right? I'd do what the others have said and just create a bunch social profiles and pages promoting the guy in a positive light.

[cardine]

I've worked a lot with reputation management companies in the past. If you are new at SEO something like this is probably a bit too hard for you. Kinda like learning to drive in a racecar!

With that being said, the easiest way to suppress news articles are to build links to parasite pages like Facebook and Twitter. They already have a lot of authority in Google's eyes, so if you build links to them they are much more likely to start ranking ahead of the negative articles. So find a positive Facebook page for this person (and the same for Twitter, LinkedIn, and a bunch of others) and build lots and lots of links to those pages.

Good luck though; doing something like this is usually very hard and most good Reputation Management Firms charge 4-5 figures to do reputation management like this.

[carrot]

As mentioned, you need to outrank the problem articles.
For some random name in local papers, should not be too hard.

You can charge a premium for this if you get it right

[AndyBlackSEO]

It's probably quicker and easier for him to change his name and start again :-)