I just read an article by Forbes the other day called Attack Of The Blogs. This article talked about how some major companies were dealing with blogs that attacked their company online. Forbes offered a few solutions including suing the blogger or the host, but I think they completely overlooked the most important weapon against bad publicity online - Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

Before I get into the tactics for fighting bad online publicity lets take a look at bad publicity in action. Notice how paypalsucks.com has taken #2 ranking to PayPal in the Google rankings? If I’m PayPal, I’m not liking all my potential customers seeing this. And it’s not just happening to PayPal, it’s happening to a number of well known companies. Anthony Yap covers this issue well in his blog titled Reputation and Brand Management Online

Ok, we know it’s happening, so what is a company to do fight it? How can a company protect the search engine real estate around a company name?

Here are a few simple recommendations on how a company can fight off bad publicity online. This fight is all about taking over the search engine real estate that comes up for your company name.

1. Start a blog
If you don’t already have a blog, I would highly recommend one. Bloggers attacking your site can post a number of entries every day - if they’re really diligent. These blogs are immediately picked up by blog search engines. If you company name is being targeted, anyone searching blogs is going to see just negative things about your company. The only way you can push these blogs out, or at least get an equal say is to post your own blog entries. Your blog entries can be short, even just a few paragraphs.

2. Submit press releases to online PR sites
If your name is being attacked make sure you post press releases with your company name in the title. If the press releases are accepted and posted online, place links to the press releases on your site using your company name in the anchor tag. Doing this will increase the link popularity of your press releases.

3. Partnerships
Partnerships can also be leveraged to fight off bad publicity online. If your partners have put up any information about your company on their site, point links to these partnership pages. Again, if you want to take over your company name real estate, you need to point links to these pages using your company name in the link.

4. Submit articles
There are numerous article submission sites now. I have a list of about 500 that I use. Submit articles that relate to your industry to these sites. In the author resource box place links to your press releases and partnership pages using your company name.

5. Create company information pages
On your own site create a “About Us” or similar page that is optimized for your company name. Use H1, H2 tags in the headers with your company name.

Fighting bad publicity online is all about taking over the search engine rankings for your company name. It’ll take a bit of work, but if you want to protect your brand, SEO will bring you the best results.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 5th, 2005 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Content Optimization, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.