There is no denying that most brands receive organic traffic largely from search engines like Google Search. So, it’s natural if you are worried because of a negative review or two that show up in the search results when your brand name is used as the keyword.
Negative reviews on the Internet can hurt your brand in more ways than you can imagine. If possible, you should take help from professional online reputation management services. However, if that’s not possible, then the following are some of the steps that you can take to have them removed:
1. Contact the Webmaster
The simplest solution is to contact the owner of the website where the negative review is posted so that you can request them for removal of the same. For that, you need to get their email address.
There are many ways you can obtain the email address of the concerned webmaster. You can just visit the website and open the “contact us” and “about us” pages to find the address. If the information is not available, then you can Google “AuthorName email ID” in which the AuthorName is the name of the author who published the negative review. If this method also doesn’t work, then you can also try finding the author on popular social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
If this method doesn’t work, then you can take steps to push the negative reviews down instead. This way, when the web users will search for your brand online, then they will see the positive reviews first. Since most users don’t even visit the second page of the search results, you can protect your brand image and online reputation with this strategy.
The following are some of the ways you can show more positive results or at least neutral results online:
2. Create Social Profiles
Did you know that social media profiles rank well on search engine results? If you haven’t created them for your brand on popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc., then it’s recommended that you set them up as soon as possible. The following are some of the biggest platforms that you should consider for the same: LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
3. Create a Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia is an authority website, but you can create a dedicated page for your brand on the platform to get the top ranks in search results and remove Google reviewsfrom the page.
When you create a Wikipedia page, then Google automatically fetches the information from the page and displays on the side. This way, you can also help with brand exposure.
4. Get More Site Links
Site links are additional links that are shown along with your main website’s link in the SERPs. You must have seen these in many websites in which the links are of key pages like “FAQ”, “About Us”, “Pricing”, etc.
There are many benefits of getting more site links. However, they are mainly related to the taking up of space in the results. For instance, if Google displays 4 site links along with your website’s link, then you will see 8 search results instead of 10. This is because the engine will use the space of one single search result for 2 links that are in a row.
There are different steps you can take to get more site links for your website Google. This way, you can make your brand more visible and get the top results to remove Google reviews.
5. Buy New Domains
You can buy new domains with the same brand name but different extensions. Let’s say that your current website is www.MyBrand.com. You can buy new domains with the following TLDs:
- www.MyBrand.biz
- www.MyBrand.net
- www.MyBrand.uk
You can publish interesting and useful content on the new domains including news, blog, etc. If done right, you can have Google rank these websites in the top results. Many websites are already enjoying this which include eBay, Amazon, etc. as they have different TLDs for different countries.
6. Guest Blog
One of the best ways to gain online exposure is to write guest blogs for authority websites. If you want to remove the negative reviews from the top results, then you can choose websites that have higher authority than those who published the reviews.
Finding good websites for guest blogging is rather easy. You can simply Google phrases like “submit content”, “add a post”, “publish content”, etc. along with your niche.
7. Become Active on Q&A Websites
Q&A websites like Quora and Yahoo Answers are still popular and often show up in the top search engine results. You can answer niche-related questions on these platforms that have higher authority to improve your online presence and to remove Google reviews that are hurting your image.
So, these were some of the things that you can do to remove or hide any negative reviews that you have received online. Following these steps, you can easily improve your online image and take your business to the next level.
