Because what get indexed is not always what you like…

While most of the time during your online experience your goal will be to get content and information about you and your business published and indexed, it will come some days or situations where some information with a negative impact on your business may found its place in the search engines results.

Today’s post is aimed at helping you deal with bad content or content who could have a negative impact on your overall online business or presence online, be it a bad review or outright uncalled criticism…

Be Cautious As To What You Disclose

 This may sounds overly obvious, but the very first step is to protect your privacy and make sure that you are very careful as to what kind of information you disclose on your site (or third party site).

Ask yourself if such information could affect your privacy or being used in a negative way that could potentially harm your business before releasing it.

Internet made it very easy to find information and luckily (most of the time) search engines are more and more skillful when it comes to finding new content on internet…

So even if you haven’t submitted your private story to any search engines or given the link to anyone, this doesn’t mean that someone may not have the chance to get access to this information.

Get At The Root Of The Problem

Assuming that it’s already too late, and the negative content is already published and possibly indexed in the search engines, the very first step you should take is to find the source of this content and remove it from there.

If the content is posted on your site or a site you have access to, simply remove the content yourself. As the content will be refreshed during the next crawling by the search engine and the cache updated, the bad content will automatically be dropped.

If the content (such as medias and photos) are posted on a third party site (Facebook, YouTube, etc…) that you have access to, while you don’t own the site, you should be able to remove the unwanted pictures yourself.

Now, assuming that you have not direct access to the source of the content or you are not the owner of the site publishing it, you should contact the webmaster of the said site and request the change to be made.

Balance Negative With Positive

Because things don’t always work the way we want, often you’ll come across situation where the webmaster will refuse to remove the content in question.

Their attitude is not always despicable and they may have a valid reason to think or decide not to do so.

Now, that being said, if you are the victim of this bad review or negative story your best alternative is then to camouflage this bad in the middle of a lot of good.

Be proactive and start to publish and have a lot more positive stories and comments to be indexed alongside this bad comment and preferably even outrank it in the search engines in such way that it became almost invisible.

So rather than being stuck with 1 bad review about your services in the search engines dramatically affecting your business, if you can add to it 9 positive reviews, people will quickly forget about the bad one, or even consider it a forged one.

In Conclusion

No one likes to see bad things about them, and even less if it makes it in the top of the search results, that being said, it’s important for us to learn how to deal with them.

Not only that but it’s also important to realize that the search engines don’t own the internet and there’s very little they can do to help you in such situation so make sure to take proactive steps and safe keep your business image!

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