Site Optimisation & Design
Online Reputation Management: Controlling Negative Reviews
- 28th January
- Dominic Gluchowski 2
Negative reviews whether true or false can have a long lasting impact on a company’s reputation and business online. Search Director of SEO Falcon, Dominic Gluchowski discusses how retailers can address this issue and manage their online reputation.
Being in the public sphere of the world wide web, especially with the advent of social media, user-generated content, blogs and forums – there are many ways in which companies can receive fabricated negative reviews.
These reviews can appear highly in the search results even for branded search terms and they have the potential to negatively affect a company, as they can not only deter potential clients from buying from them, but also make it very difficult for any public relation firms to promote these businesses in the media.
A Google search for 'clear solar' reveals not only the company's website, but negative reviews in the first page results.
Some examples of negative review websites affecting brand names include ‘decor my eyes’, ‘decor my eyes scam’, ‘clear solar’, ‘clear solar complaints’, ‘eharmony’ and ‘eharmony rip off’.
This raises an important issue on how businesses can manage their reputations online from a search engine ranking perspective. At SEO Falcon, this is an issue that we have come across for some of our high profile clients who are perhaps more in the public eye. So we will focus on explaining how to make these negative mentions disappear from the first few pages of Google.
The first solution is to hire a SEO company specialising in reputation management however there might be a high cost associated with the work because it’s very labour intensive.
The alternative is to do it in-house by creating and promoting pages from various reputable websites for your brand name and any other desired search terms (such as ‘your brand name’ plus any negative keywords). In theory, at least some of these promoted pages should outrank the negative reviews, pushing them down to the third and fourth pages of Google search for your brand.
Getting Control
To have some control over the first two pages in Google for your brand name you will need up to 19 pieces of content. However, since not every piece of content will be successful in outranking every negative brand mention, you need to aim to create around 50 pieces of content. This can be done by:
- Promotion on Social Networks. Create and promote your company pages on social networking websites. It is important to maintain and update your pages on regular basis in conjunction with adding friends and connections. Social networking sites that you could use include: Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook.
- Create new pages, blogs and new sub-domains on your website. This is helpful for ranking above negative posts that appear in results for your brand. Your domain name is likely to have much more authority for your branded search terms than outside websites with the negative mentions. You could use this as an opportunity to address the ‘negative’ accusations on your own website and optimise your pages by including ‘your brand name’ plus ‘negative keywords’ at the start of the page title and at least once in the body text. This can be done on multiple pages and sub domains as long as there is no duplicate content (including in the page titles).
- Leverage websites that your company owns and partners with. Create posts on other websites optimised for your brand name, along with any negatively related search terms. This generally leads to great results given that your domains are aged and trusted within Google.
- Set up brand new websites for variations of the exact match domains for your business (e.g. ‘.com’, ‘.com.au’, ‘.net,au’, ‘.org.au’, etc). Furthermore set up additional websites for negative phrases affecting your domain name, for example: brand name including the words ‘scam’, ‘rip off’, ‘complaints’ (e.g. brandname-negativekeyword.com.au). Hyphenated versions of the domains also work well. Set up a minimum of five page websites on different webhosting providers and optimise your content. It is important to remember that Google penalises duplicate content so you shouldn’t simply copy and paste the text and images between the sites.
- Leverage any pre-existing news articles that already appear on newspaper websites. To do this you will need to perform link building as the existing articles cannot be changed hence they cannot be optimised.
- Create additional blogs. Set up and optimise small blogs on blog platforms including WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and Posterous.
- Create articles and post them on article directories including EzineArticles, Squidoo, HubPages, Buzzle, and Go Articles, just to name a few! The articles need to be optimised and posted on old accounts with good history otherwise they might not have any impact.
Where Not to Create Content
Avoid creating content on websites where other people can leave comments, edit your entries or insert additional references (such as Wikipedia, etc.). By avoiding these types of websites you should have control over all of your listings.
Link Marketing
If you are able to, getting other high quality websites to link to your newly created content (blogs, .org and other newly created websites) will ensure that Google will start trusting your new website and as a result it will start including them in its search results. Generally it takes three to nine months for Google to trust a new website and the quickest way to gain the trust is to obtain the high quality links.
Lower quality websites can be used to link to high quality content pages including news articles and social networking sites. For example, it should only take few lower quality links with the exact anchor text ‘brand name negative keyword’ to get an article on theage.com.au to rank within the first page for that search term. It is important not to point lower quality websites to your newly created content (blogs, etc) as it might be seen by Google as an attempt to manipulate search results.
Interlinking Pattern (Image Source: SEO Falcon)
Inter-linking Between Newly Created Pages and Websites
Make sure that you inter-link all of your newly created content, avoiding signals of link farms or link exchanges. The sites that are perhaps not as authoritative should receive more links, than those that are established and hold more authority with search engines. The diagram provides an example of an inter-linking pattern that should be developed.
Encourage customers who are pleased with your company to post positive reviews
Along with the unhappy, there are always the happy and even ecstatic fans of your business. Ensure that you encourage customers who are happy with your products and services to post positive reviews and testimonials on your website, along with any industry specific sites or sometimes even on the websites with the negative reviews.
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4 Comments
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interesting that you mention “Decor My Eyes” apparently with reference to critical comments given theat the owner Vitaly Borker, who ran the DecorMyEyes.com was arrested on counts of cyber-bullying and fraud.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373936,00.asp
the guy is alleged to have threatened to rape and kill a customer who complained. I dont think we need to encourage people like that to take steps to hide critics from the first couple of pages of google!
Nice article, really like step by step approach.
Good article Dominic. I would simplify your last point by saying “Ask all customers to give your products and services a review”. The positive will far outweigh the negative by at least 4:1. At Bazaarvoice we have surfaced over 180 billion pieces of consumer feedback for our clients globally and 82% of those are 4 or 5 stars out of 5!
WHat’s more all evidence suggestes that leaving those few negative ones there adds to the authenticity of the other opinions and actually increases conversion rates further.
Besides that all of that lovely, fresh, mostly positive content is acting like “Google Juice” for your product pages…
Very good point Graham! I totally agree with you.