Negative results in the top 10 SERPS for your brand name? Want to move those negative results down to page 3+ but aren’t sure where to get started? Here’s a simple primer.
1. After you’ve figured out that yes, this is a negative result from an issue that has since been resolved (closed lawsuit, one time complaint from an ex employee/client/competitor, etc) and not an open product or service issue that needs to be addressed, the next step is to analyze the negative results. Is your brand name/keyword in the title tag and url? What is the PageRank of the site? How many links are pointing to the page that is ranking? How many links are pointing to the domain that is ranking? What are the PageRanks of those links? What is the anchor text of those links? Doing some research in the beginning will set the groundwork for figuring out how difficult it will be to move down the negative results and what types of links, sites, and profiles you’ll need to create in order to rank positive and neutral sites higher than the negative results.
2. Find sites that are neutral and/or positive that aren’t ranking on page 1 yet. There might be some great sites out there that have both age (published years ago), PageRank (domain or page), and links that just need a few great links pushed towards them in order to rank high for your keyword. To find some of these sites, follow these steps:
1. Search for your keyword and look at the results on pages 2, 3, 4 all the way to 10+. I’ve seen pages rise up quickly in the ranks that were PageRank 0 but had a high domain PageRank and links and just needed some additional links to the appropriate page. The fact that those sites are already ranking within a few pages for your keyword means that it has the possibility of moving up, it just needs the extra push.
2. Use search operators like inurl:keyword (such as inurl:rachel kuptz) and intitle:keyword. You may find some news sites or even pages on your own site that have a great PageRank and just need to be optimized a bit more and have some links pushed towards them.
3. Create sites. Break out your career, news, charity, blog, locations pages to be their own mini sites or even just subdomains of your site (careers.company.com). You’ll see this often in larger companies when you type their names in the search engines where the results show the company site first, then a number of subdomain and landing page sites in the following results.
4. Create profiles on other sites. Sites like Twitter, Facebook Pages, Crunchbase, and LinkedIn company pages all rank high for your name/company name when optimized properly, linked up, and are updated on a semi regular basis.
