Removing a Negative Comment in Google Search Results

Many people, businesses and organizations have found themselves the victims of negative postings on complaint websites such as Rip-0F-F- Re-p0-rt,
P1ss-0F-F- C0n$u-mers and others. (I have purposely typed these incorrectly so as to not give these websites or their owners ANY web reference weight by correctly spelling the domain name.)

I have been following these websites for some time now and have learned two distinct things:

1) You either love or hate them.
2) These types of websites are turning the Internet into an information cesspool.

Let's talk about point number one.

You Love Them
You might love these types of websites because they provide you an online sounding board to vent, rant, whine and complain about a negative experience you had with a product, service, person or company.

I can relate. Recently my wife had a bad experience with an employee of a local retailer which was part of a national jewelry store chain.

It would have been cathartic for me to post negative reviews on a website, but I chose to take the high road and keep my complaints between me, the store and the corporate office. As a small business owner myself, making public posts would not contribute to the common economic good as it does not reflect well on all the good employees who work in this store. It would only serve a personal desire to impugn or embarrass this company online.

Had I not worked in corporate America and received a regular pay check for many years, I probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. I would have jumped right into the fray and posted a negative comment on a complaint website.

You Hate Them
You hate these types of websites because they are wide open to abuse. Examples of abuse include: ex-employees posting false statements or competitors posting false statements hoping to steal your sales or business.

Most people assume that some type of legal action is the best way to get a fraudulent posting removed. I don’t believe that. If you have a rich uncle or your father is a partner in a huge law firm you might try suing the website. But this is extremely expensive to do, and the final decision will not be a clear cut victory in your favor.

We live in America. Negative speech, whether it be true or false, is protected in most states. This is a tradition that was exercised in newspapers and leaflets during the political campaigns going way back to George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln.

Today that negative speech is in the form of online postings which remain live and online indefinitely. This has led to the proliferation of reputation management companies.

Fighting the Negative Search Result
On the World Wide Web, no business wants to see a complaint website with a negative comment about them anywhere near their business website. Yikes! What do you do?

You could hire an online reputation management company or learn to push back this negative review yourself.

Below are the basic steps that any online reputation management company takes to push the resulting negative website back to page 2, 3, 4 or 5 on Google.

First, the company will review and modify pages in your website to be sure it is search engine friendly.

Second, they will create and/or post to Blogs, Directories, Websites, Forums to help facilitate the 'pushing back' of the negative website reference in specific search results.

Helping Google to Fill The Cesspool
Today we have all these reputation companies, web developers, web writers, and SEO teams creating useless content and useless links to fight back against all these complaint websites. Even the complaint websites are getting in on this action and offering removal fees at up to $2400. There are even negative posts on competing complaint websites saying negative things about the other. I have found postings of people complaining that they paid to have the posting removed and once removed another appeared the next day. Sounds suspicious?

My Suggestion
Google employees and their engineers can, and should, come up with a professional way to handle these unprofessional complaint websites. Here are a few suggestions:

a. Any complaint website that does not display the full name, email and phone of the person making the complaint should get pushed back in results. Or at least display an email that is tied to where they are a member.

b. Any companies having an A+ rating with the BBB should algorithmically negate or receive a push back of any complaint websites targeting them.

I think this makes sense and sounds doable. I truly hope this posting reaches a Google decision maker who wants to see search queries cleaned up, more relevant and increasingly useful.

At this writing it is well worth mentioning that Yahoo and Bing do not rank these type of complaint websites as relevant in searches, not nearly as much as Google does. As a developer, I believe this speaks to inherent flaws in Google assigning so much value to back links.

Rick Vidallon is President of Visionefx, a Web design company based in Virginia Beach, Va. They provide services to national companies as well as small to medium businesses throughout the United States. Rick can be reached at (757) 619-6456 or rick@visionefx.net.