How can I push down negative publicity on Google's search page?

Originally posted on Quora

You can push down negative publicity by ranking positive or neutral publicity above it.

Here are the steps to go about it

Do an audit of the negative publicity article ranking for your keyword

- Analyze landing page content. Its length, content heading, meta title and description, if the post has comments, etc

- Check the domain authority of the ranking site. Higher authority sites will be much harder to push in search results.

- Check if the article has backlinks and social shares.

- Check keywords for which this site is ranking with tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs.

Strategize on building properties that can outrank these properties

- You now have an understanding of the competition that you are up against.

- Now carefully analyze and strategize which properties are you going to build to outrank the competition.

- This again depends on a couple of factors. Negative reviews for a brand or for an individual. (Person Name + controversy) it is unlikely that you are going to see a lot of success. The most you could do here is to have your interview published in a high authority portal with your views and minimize the damage or comment on the existing post with your justifications.

- If it is (person name + brand name) searches, the following properties could be your best bet - Linkedin, Facebook, Crunchbase, Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo. A hat tip, go to this site Knowem.com and capture your profiles. Add information to these profiles as comprehensively as possible. Check on articles on how to optimize social profiles for each platform and you will get several help articles.

Build links to these profiles both through internal and external linking. For example, Linkedin internal linking. Publish regularly on Linkedin, add connections, comment on other people’s posts. This not only is a sign to Google that this is an active profile but adding connections also improves internal linking as they show up on other people’s profiles.

Build links to these social profiles & externally link these profiles or build links to these profiles to improve their authority.

Appear for interviews on high authority portals if you can. We have typically seen anywhere between 4–6 months to get social profiles ranked.

- If it is (brand name) for which negative reviews are ranking, they are likely going to be either a bad review on a third party blog/news site, negative reviews on Google Business page, Glassdoor reviews, a bad review by a disgrunted customer on a blog, etc.

- Your best bet is to address the negative review if you can if it doesn’t escalate the situation. Since reviews within Glasdoor or Google business is a search engine within another search engine, you can strategize to push these negative reviews down by getting happy customers/employees to post positive reviews.

More in-depth reviews tend to get more likes, marked as useful in Google business that can improve their rankings in reviews. Get people more active on these platforms to review you.

Again build links to these pages and continue repeating the process.

A lot of businesses tend to think that there is a magic pill to pushing down negative reviews. No there isn’t one.

Treat each of your positive reviews as a separate entity or website that you are trying to rank higher for a specific keyword query. There are no shortcuts. Only concentrated, continuous efforts can help you push down negative search results.