How to fight with Bad Publicity??

[mit]

Hi Guys,

I want some serious comment / suggestion over here if you a brand, and if you search for your name in any search engine like Google. Now what you are seeing is - Bad Publicity Links on your Brand Name, just below your website and will be continuous for 8-10 web pages in search engines.

What would be the first step from your side to tackle with this situation?

[Tripta_Kneoteric]

Even if you plan to write against the negative links, you would have to promote them to replace it.
So, Why not try it ethically and promote your pages to replace them.

Do all you applicable Marketing activities and target to rank in place of the bad links.

All The Best

[mit]

I am looking for some more comments guys...please look at the issue.

[briggidere]

i have come across this issue a few times, but i am glad to say it was usually positive comments about us rather than negative.

The negative ones are quite difficult to deal with depending on what it actually is. It is a forum posting, blog article, general article on a site etc.

If it's a forum posting you can go in and defend yourself, but dont try to pretend you are not the company, if you do this and get caught it would make things look worse.

It really depends on the nature of the comments too. Are they true? If not you can make them remove it or threaten to take legal action through damage to reputation/loss of business etc.

Every situation will differ

[Tripta_Kneoteric]

Write good/informative articles relevant for your brand publicity. Submit them to all possible article directories.

Post theme based adds on classifieds directories. These ads are are likely to get cached 2nd day (faster than a new webpage). note that these classifieds websites have more authority, which is shared with the add too.

Develop some power for your about us page, since this page contains the content that best describes your brand.

I hope this could help you.

[bobchrist]

I think best to hire bloggers from service like PPP/smorty etc to generate good review about your product or service.

[webcosmo]

I wouldn't worry much of that. You are getting some backlinks from them anyways. And remember bad publicity is a good marketing technique sometimes. Look at Britney Spears.
If you really wanna remove them, only way is make them rank lower. To do that you could use usual SEO techniques. Have some backlinks from related sites with same keywords as you are searching for. Then make sure you submit them to social networking sites. Generally that works.

[rembrant]

briggidere has some good comments. Whatever you do don't pretend you are someone you are not. It could backfire big time.

[mit]

I think social bookmarking and blogs writing can help.

And also some of press releases with also give some more help.

[prasad_shejale]

I will also lok from the other side.

Just investigate whether the comments mentioned were actually a problem and take care to improve your service.

Prasad

[siteman]

Just want to add that for the blogposts and backlinks, I'd target negative keywords as well as positive words, eg 'is xxx company a scam?'
so that anyone searching for 'xxx company scam' will see your page and
read your other side of the stories.

[horaciocs]

Like siteman said, you could try to use that to your profit. If the negative comments create some space for speculation, your name will certainly grow. What you have to do is to prepare your websites to receive people looking to know more about the negative comments and write some articles expressing how long your website has been online and even try to use some testimonials from people who have tried your product.

Let the people that you did business with do the talking. Have them write messages supporting you and I guess you'll be on your way to recover from the bad advertiser.