We get asked all the time how bad and/or false reviews and comments can be taken off Google’s search page results. Sad to say, most of the time they can’t.

Bummer, huh? Especially because ticked off customers tend to respond more than happy customers. And bad competitors are apt to be aggressively negative. This is why the most important thing you can do is to be diligent in your listening.

If you find an illegitimate posting soon after it was submitted, and you are fairly certain it has been put there by a competitor, you can submit a complaint to the sponsor of its source (i.e. Yelp, Insider Pages) as well as the search engine (i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo!). But you need to do it quickly. And you need to have legitimate backup to prove it.

If you find a negative, but legitimate, posting, 90% of the time it pays to respond to it publicly – no matter how painful that may be. If you also have a way to reach them offline without invading their privacy, it is obviously helpful. But, even more than the unhappy complainer, think what your response will do for a potential customer who reads it. You have the opportunity to show them you care, you are timely, and you’ve made an effort to right what might be a wrong. Only when it appears that you are dealing with an irrational person who would just use your response to continue degrading you or your company should you keep quiet.

Finally, the best thing you can do to get these comments out of readers eyesight is to “push them down”. That means create more relevant and current information that will show up higher in search results and move this older information down and off the first search page results.

If you have questions or want to talk more about this, feel free to contact us.