Company wants damaging articles pushed back on Google. Any ideas on best way to do this?

I believe that the best way is to out rank the articles that are ranking in google using your own websites. Hope this helps.

not possible I dont think, if you figure it out let me know

I doubt it is a competitor, it is more likely an unhappy customer.

which all the more begs to suggest that it isnt a competitor

There are ways to get the articles removed, by contacting the websites they are on, and depending on the content, may I suggest you communicate with the damaging websites uplinks (ISP)

its like a glass full or water and the water is the bad articles, you have to keep adding articles to the water which act like rocks displacing the negative articles, once you have enough good new articles published on all sorts of different sites, it should knock the bad articles down, but what you have to do is beat the bad article poster at his own game by having your articles outrank on SERP's thus knocking them down further.

It has been proven that a huge percentage of people searching on google never get off the first page, focus on the top ten results and let the rest grow old.

of course if it someone talented running an online marketing campaign against the company requesting your help, then its just going to be an ongoing war until they stop or until you become smarter and faster than them.

I have ran several online marketing campaigns against websites who have dealt with others in an unfair way, if a website or internet user that sells me something defrauds me, then it is on. I am not anonymous either, screw people over and I am going to scream about it loudly all over the internet, perhaps your potential client/customer has screwed over some of their customers and they finally screwed one over, that is going to make them pay (in lost business). This is the most likely thing especially if the articles seem to have no trace to the author & dont pooint to competitor websites.

Interesting. I can't comment on the business practices of the company, but a Google search revealed that there's nobody who has been "ripped off". I can't really find any bad press on that front. Although when I spoke to the owner of the company he seemed genuinely upset by what's being done. Something strikes me as this isn't an unhappy customer.

It looks like the campaign has been set up to put people off using the company, and some suggestions state that there are "alternative companies" to use in the article but no links. It could very well be that the company behind this (if it is a company) are trying to put people off using that company and to search for an alternative. The competitor is #2. The 3rd company in this niche is on page 2, so their SEO efforts are poor anyway so I highly doubt it would be them.

Something strikes me as it being company #2. Even the owner suggested this before I even had a chance to look at anything.

Plus, I can't imagine any of their customers being involved in SEO. They are two worlds apart. Of course I could be very wrong, but so far it does add up to it being #2.

If you're after sheer rankings, have you company create and upload a Google Hangout every day. You can do hangouts with an audience of one - I used t to that all the time.

Google gives preference to anything on their properties (ie, GooglePlus). Make sure to include keywords in the title of the hangout (ie, presented by Business Name) and mention the title several times during the broadcast (as Google automatically adds closed captioning).

On the site itself (if it's using WP), create a category that has nice keywords, plus, say, "resources", "news", "tutorials", etc. Make sure your Google Hangouts thingee is set to that particular category.

Thus, after 5 days, you should have a 5 day tutorial, each listed the company's Google+ page, each uploaded to your site, each linked to other social media properties, etc.etc.etc.

'Twill go a *long* way to building regaining SEO.

Hope that helps!

Check your local laws for libel defamination. Then the next question will be " is it worth pursuing?"

Playing REALLY dirty.

You mentioned that your client thought that this was potentially a competitor doing this.

You can absolutely CRUSH this from happening by finding some company that will send out 20 million spam emails that all have an add that looks like it's for the competition.

The spam complaints will get their servers turned off.

Now this really is a sort of "scorched earth" method of getting competition to stop, but then I take a real dim view of people doing unethical crap like B.S. articles and link attacks against my clients so in my opinion it's what they get.

Bring up those that you want to the first page would be the best option; few users will search past the 1st page.

Doing this you can cherry pick what your client wants to see on the first page anyways. It'll be a lot of work though I'd assume they would be willing to invest the adequate capital to protect their search terms for situations like this.

This seems like an excellent opportune client; typically for these kind of projects we want to validate first that those posts are not legitimate (there's really no point working on their brand image if their service is the issue as it'll only arise after some time and there's also ethics). Although for something like this situation, a competitor can only do so much and it'd be great for the client as they can see immediate results to their investment (Better company image => likely means more conversion and customers) so they'd be willing to pay more and re-invest if you can do it well.

Common practice is to outrank the negative articles with the same keywords in several articles, which essentially buries the negative review in results.

Best thing to do is, to bury the links with better properties. Facebook, youtube, etc work well. Do more articles in the same places, forum posts, anything like that will work well.

I don't know about the law around there, but in Finland at least you can't hinder other person's livelihood by publishing false information. If the claims are truthful that's another matter. If the laws support your cause you might want to file a police report. They've got much more authority to discuss with operators and webhosts, and ask for metadata about the perpetrators. In the worst case this route will just not get you anywhere.

If those articles are on servers that are abroad then it's much harder to get them down. In that case a polite letter to the host in question may be your best bet, but it might just not get you anywhere either.

Flooding the first results page should not be too hard in this case. Set up social media profiles and link them from your site, write good articles, and try to score some press hits.