Last Updated on by Azib Yaqoob
Do you want to take control of your online reputation by removing negative search results associated with your name, or perhaps you’re looking to push down negative listings?
In this guide, I’ll show you effective strategies to manage your online image and ensure that it accurately represents the best version of yourself.
Table of Contents
Understanding Negative Search Results
Bad stuff about you on Google can really mess things up in your personal and professional life. It can harm your reputation, strain relationships, and hold back your career.
It can also make you lose out on business deals. People might get turned off by negative reviews or unkind things about you or your business.
In today’s digital age, as most people rely on the internet for information and research, negative content can be particularly harmful.
It spreads rapidly, reaching a wide audience. This makes it difficult to manage the brand image of you or your business.
Getting rid of negative content from Google empowers you to manage your online image and protect your reputation.
Whether it’s removing harmful content or pushing it down with positive information, the goal is to ensure your online presence. It should truly represent your values and identity.
This not only fosters trust and credibility with peers, clients, and potential employers. It also plays a vital role in building a successful personal or professional brand.
I suggest you should take strong action against negative search results. Bad reputation includes defamatory content in search results, bad reviews, false information, or anything that impacts your brand image.
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What is a Negative Search Result?
A negative search result is online content that portrays a person, brand, or topic in an unfavorable light when found in search engine results. It often includes negative news, bad reviews, or critical posts that can harm one’s online reputation.
Negative online content has the potential to harm a business’s reputation, leading to significant revenue losses and, in some cases, even bankruptcy.
We can deal with negative results in two ways:
- Attempting legal action to permanently remove negative search results, which can be costly and less effective.
- Using a safe and efficient strategy to create positive content that pushes down negative results. This solution works well for most businesses and individuals.
Can Negative SEO Suppress Search Results?
Negative SEO, also known as Reverse SEO, involves the creation of low-quality backlinks to push down a specific webpage in search results. I’ve emphasized this to my clients many times, and I’ll reiterate it here.
Negative SEO is not an effective strategy. While it may have worked in the past, Google has become adept at detecting spam and unnatural links.
To save time and money, I strongly advise against using negative SEO for online reputation management.
Unfortunately, some online reputation management companies still offer this service, so it’s crucial to steer clear of such providers.
For more insights, you can refer to my comprehensive negative SEO case study, where I elaborate on the reasons for my stance against this strategy.
Removing Negative Search Results on Google
Here are some actionable strategies that you can implement to effectively remove negative results.
In the following sections, I will discuss practical methods, including requesting removal from the source and using legal channels. However, I will suggest you should take legal help when trying this method.
Important: If the website hosting the content appears untrustworthy, avoid requesting removal as they may reproduce the content.
Requesting Removal of Negative Article
While this method for managing your online reputation isn’t very effective, it’s still worth trying.
Here’s how to ask for the negative article to be taken off Google:
- First, find the negative article in the first ten Google result pages.
- Next, find the email of the person who posted this article. You can use a tool like ‘who.is’ to help.
- Then, send them a message asking them to remove it.
But be careful – most times, this method doesn’t work, and it might even make things worse.
Some websites make money by posting negative things about businesses or people to get money from them. So, only try this if you really have no other choice.
Remove Negative Google Results with DMCA
Google has simplified the process of requesting search result removal, but, in most cases, it proves ineffective.
Google only complies with the removal of search results when they pose a real threat to an individual. This includes cases involving copyright infringement, such as stealing someone else’s digital work.
If a negative search result related to your name appears, you can request its removal from Google by completing this form.
Google has strict rules for removing search results.
Exercise caution and provide as much relevant information as possible, explaining the reason behind your request.
Additionally, be aware that attempting to manipulate the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) process may lead Google to take legal action against you or your company.
If this method succeeds, congratulations!
If not, don’t worry, as you can still push down negative search results.
Push Down Negative Google Results
My clients have had great success with suppressing negative search results. Whenever someone asks me how to handle their negative search results, I recommend this strategy.
Using this approach, unwanted Google search results tend to disappear for most clients over time. I keep an eye on those keywords, and negative results rarely make a comeback.
Let me walk you through how it works.
1. Make a Website
In today’s digital age, having a website is essential for the survival of your business. If your company or brand doesn’t have a website, it’s crucial to create one without delay.
In online reputation management, our primary objective is to secure as much space as possible on the first page of Google search results. This involves purchasing multiple domains and building new websites.
Our aim is to generate a substantial amount of content and replace negative search results with these new sites. However, managing multiple websites can be challenging, particularly when you’re focused on improving your online reputation.
To streamline this process, you can hire individuals from various online job networks to create and maintain these websites. This approach saves you valuable time, which can be better spent creating additional content and web properties.
Once your websites are ready, you should create an effective SEO strategy. This strategy aims to ensure that your websites appear on the first page of search results.
Ranking multiple websites for the same keyword is a complex task, best handled by a professional SEO expert.
Now that your websites are prepared, it’s essential to optimize their on-page SEO. Here are some valuable SEO tips:
- Include your brand keyword in the H1 heading, also known as the page title.
- Use your keyword in the meta title.
- Create a meta description and incorporate your keyword.
- Link your homepage with the keyword from internal pages.
Follow these steps to create websites for managing your online reputation:
- Purchase domain names related to your brand or business name.
- Design and create your websites using user-friendly platforms like WordPress.
- Optimize on-page SEO, and ensure they load quickly on mobile devices.
- Develop backlinks (or hire someone) to enhance the ranking of your website.
2. Create social media profiles
Social media is a powerful tool for building and maintaining a positive online reputation.
You can optimize your social media profiles with relevant keywords.
Regularly sharing positive content can help improve your search engine ranking.
You can use some of these social media competitor analysis tools to research how other people in your niche use social platforms.
Improve your online presence on the 1st page of Google with optimized social media profiles.
Remember, our goal is to occupy as many 1st page results as possible to remove negative search results.
You can start by creating profiles on top social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Quora, and Pinterest.
Also, add keywords related to the negative queries for which you want to rank these profiles.
The most important thing to remember is that you must update your social media profiles regularly. Doing so will tell Google that these pages are frequently updated and are more relevant to the targeted keyword.
- Create social media profiles on your keyword.
- Interlink all those social media profiles and pages.
- Keep all the social profiles regularly updated.
- Add negative keywords throughout your social media.
3. Create Web 2.0 Blogs
I have had great success using web 2.0 blogs to occupy 1st-page results. It helped me suppress content for a lot of my clients.
Don’t worry if you don’t know what is a Web 2.0 blog. I am going to explain it.
What is a Web 2.0 blog?
Web 2.0 are publisher-type sites allowing users to create their pages with a unique URL. These sites include free blog platforms(Tumblr, WordPress.com, Blogger), social bookmarking sites, social media platforms(Twitter, Reddit, Quora), and video-sharing platforms (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo).
Web 2.0 provides page owners with sharing, grouping, and networking facilities. Most importantly, they create unique URLs where you can give beneficial information to rank for your targeted keyword.
Which Web 2.0 platforms should you use?
Platforms like Medium, WordPress.com, Blogspot, and Tumblr are good examples of Web 2.0 blogs.
You can create free blogs on those platforms and create good-quality content around your targeted keywords. Also, make sure that you optimize them for SEO.
If you don’t know how to do SEO, read about SEO as much as possible. It is a crucial step because you can’t rank your Web 2.0 property on the 1st page if it is not optimized.
Also, you should regularly update all your blogs. Frequent updates tell Google that your site is more recent and frequently updated, which helps bring it to the first page.
- Create blogs on Medium, WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr, etc.
- Optimize them for search engines on your keyword.
- Regularly create content on those Web 2.0 blogs.
- Don’t ever mention negative search results (that we want to push down) on any Web 2.0 or social profile pages.
4. Write on High Authority Blogs
Blogging is the easiest way to cover up your 1st-page search results.
You should find top-quality blogs and news sites that publish guest posts on their website. Make sure their domain authority is excellent. Higher domain authority sites’ articles tend to rank easily on the first page of Google.
Some of these blogs even help you write those articles to publish on their blog.
- Find top-quality blogs and news websites that are relevant to you.
- Pitch them an article idea that you want to write.
- Get your articles published under your name. You can get backlinks from that article if you want to rank your website.
5. Create Powerful Backlinks
When you want to rank a website in the top positions of Google, backlinks are quite important. But, it is a little challenging process to create backlinks.
You can create low-quality backlinks through forums, Reddit, and social media websites. However, Google only gives a link juice when it finds the link relevant and within context.
- When you create positive content, it is time to give it credibility.
- Create links on high-quality, relevant websites and link to your positive content.
- Backlinks can improve search rankings for your positive stories, especially on Google.
Here’s how you can effectively get links to your positive articles or press releases.
Use software like BuzzStream to find link opportunities and send outreach emails. It is quite effective and doesn’t cost that much.
When you have a list of publishers within your industry, reach out to them via email and ask if they offer a guest post opportunity or paid promotion.
Don’t worry if you don’t get a reply from them. Now, you should improvise your outreach email template and subject line.
Once you start getting replies, use the template to contact more publishers.
Removing Results from Other Search Engines
While removing some pages from Google is possible, the odds of getting them approved are very low.
On the other hand, it is illegal if you falsify DMCA on any search engine. Google, Microsoft, & Yahoo can take legal action against you if you deliberately purge the results.
To remove information from other major search engines, please follow the given links:
- Bing removal (report copyright infringement)
- Yahoo removal
- Yandex search removal
- Removing content from Google search and services
The most helpful way to remove negative search results is by providing positive search results to search engines.
- Write high-quality content on your online social profiles and web properties.
- Promote your brand online by using advertising, guest postings, and PR.
- Create more web properties and increase your brand influence in the search.
- Manage social media accounts for your business more frequently.
- Respond effectively to every positive or negative review related to your brand.
In short, improve your brand influence online. It will take some time to get satisfactory results, but eventually, it will work.
If you need help with negative results, please feel free to contact me.
