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Negative Google search results can harm your online reputation, affecting your personal or professional life. Fortunately, you can take steps to remove and suppress these negative results. In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at how to remove and suppress negative Google search results.
Whether you are an online business or a professional who wants to get hired, a negative search reputation is nothing to be taken lightly.
Table of Contents
The Impact of Negative Search Results
Negative content on Google can significantly impact your personal or professional life. It can damage your reputation, affect your relationships, and even harm your career prospects. Negative content can also lead to lost business opportunities, as potential clients or employers may be deterred by negative reviews or unfavorable content about you or your business.
In today’s digital age, where most people rely on the internet for information and research, harmful content can be particularly damaging. It can spread quickly and reach a broad audience, making it challenging to control the narrative about yourself or your business.
Removing negative content from Google can help you take control of your online presence and protect your reputation. By eliminating harmful content or suppressing it with positive content, you can ensure that your online presence accurately reflects who you are and what you stand for. This can increase trust and credibility among your peers, clients, and potential employers. Additionally, it can help you maintain a positive online reputation, which is crucial for 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?
Any page, image, or video about your brand that gives a wrong online impression is considered a negative search result.
It could damage the online reputation of a business. A poor reputation will result in huge revenue loss and sometimes complete bankruptcy.
Repairing an online reputation is called ‘online reputation management.
It is a marketing practice that utilizes search engine optimization strategies to remove or suppress negative search results.
We can repair your reputation in two different ways:
1. Getting the negative search result permanently removed based on legal action. However, it could cost thousands of dollars and may not work well.
2. Creating positive information with an effective strategy to push down negative search results. It is safe, efficient, and works well for most businesses and individuals.
Does Negative SEO Help in Pushing Down Search Results?
Negative SEO or Reverse SEO is a strategy where people create low-quality backlinks to suppress a particular page from the search results.
I have told this many times to my clients, and I will repeat this here too.
Negative SEO is not an effective strategy. It did work in the past, but Google can now detect spam and natural links.
You should save time and money by never using a negative SEO strategy for online reputation management. Some online reputation management companies still offer this service, so please avoid such companies.
For more information, look at my detailed negative SEO case study to understand why I am against using this strategy.
How to Remove Negative Search Results from Google?
Important: If the website that hosts this content looks untrustworthy, then never ask them to remove your article. They might reproduce the content.
Request the Content Publisher to Remove Negative Article
This online reputation management strategy rarely works but is worth giving a try.
Ask the publisher for negative content removal from Google. Here’s how:
- Find all the negative results from at least the first ten pages of Google.
- Look for the email address of the content publisher. You can also use who.is to find some information.
- Send a request to the site owner to remove that negative page from their site.
The strategy does not work often. Also, there’s a risk of triggering the publisher to post more negative content.
Some websites make a living by posting harmful content about businesses and professionals to extort money. Be extra careful when dealing with such websites.
Most marketers I know do not use the abovementioned strategy because it can backfire. However, this strategy could be used if you don’t have a choice.
Use DMCA to Remove Negative Google Search Results
Google made it easier for people to request search results removal. But, in most cases, it doesn’t work.
Google only complies with the search results which are a real threat to a person or if it is stealing someone else’s digital work (copyright infringement).
If a negative search result on your name shows up, you can ask Google to remove it by filling out this form. Google is strict when it comes to the removal of search results.
You should use it carefully and include as much information as possible, like why you want to get this removed and what’s the reason.
Also, please keep in mind that if you try to manipulate the DMCA process, Google may take legal action against you or your company.
If that works for you, then congratulations!
If not, don’t worry, as you can still push down negative search results.
How to Suppress Negative Search results from Google?
Negative search results suppression always works for my clients. This is the strategy I recommend if someone asks me how they can control their negative search results.
With this strategy, unwanted Google search results disappear for most clients after some time. As I keep tracking those keywords, the negative results hardly return.
Let me tell you how I do it.
1. Create a Website
Having a website in this digital age is essential for the survival of your business. If you don’t own a website for your company or brand, you need to do it immediately.
In online reputation management, our goal is to own as much space on the 1st-page of Google as possible.
You can purchase as many domains as you want and create new websites.
Remember, our goal here is to create a lot of content and replace negative search results with these sites.
Creating and maintaining many websites is difficult, especially when you want to improve your online reputation.
You can hire people from various online job networks to create and maintain those websites. It will save you a lot of time which you can utilize by creating more content and web properties.
When you have those sites ready, you should make an effective SEO strategy. We want them to be on the first page. Again, ranking a lot of websites on the same keyword is not an easy job. However, a professional SEO expert can do it more effectively.
Now that you have your websites ready, you should optimize their on-page SEO. Here are some essential SEO tips that you will find helpful:
- Add your brand keyword at least once in the H1 heading. H1 is also known as the page title.
- Use your keyword in the meta title.
- Add a meta description and include your keyword.
- Link your homepage on the keyword from internal pages.
These are the steps to create websites for managing your online reputation:
- Purchase domain names related to your brand/business name.
- Create and design your websites using WordPress (it’s easy to use).
- Optimize on-page SEO and make sure they load faster on mobile.
- Create backlinks (or hire someone) to improve 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 and regularly share positive content to 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 a web 2.0 blog is. I am going to explain it step by step.
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 Blogging 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.
How to Remove Negative Search Results from different 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.
