Help getting a bad review off first page.

Hey SEO experts of BHW!

So I'm helping my friend's company out with some SEO and could use some advice, as I'm still a student of SEO myself.

Basically, when you google his company name or his company name + "review" or any variation, a really nasty review comes up that was posted on a forum page that relates to his business.

The thing is, this page was in existence before my friend even started a website for his company, and so it has stuck around for quite some time. He even hired an SEO company for over a year and paid them a lot but they didn't make much progress (dropped from 2 to 3).

The review's URL actually starts with the F word, and I'm wondering if that is something I can use to maybe report to Google or something (I don't even know if that's a thing, just an idea).

Also, looking for a way to get his Instagram and Twitter to rank fast ahead of the Bad Review. I think by adding more reviews on his Yelp, that will rank up quickly.

As of now, the SERP looks like this:

1. His company website
2. His company's facebook
3. Bad review (Page rank 1 and DA 27 according to Moz plugin)
4. A good review (possibly made by the SEO company he hired)
5. Company Twitter
6. A youtube video review someone made years ago, that's actually a positive
7. His Instagram
8. His Yelp (with 1 good review)

The Search volume (according to Google KWP) is only like 390/month, so I'm guessing its just getting lots of engagement. There are no backlinks to the bad review and the PR is 1/ DA is 27, so not that strong.

Thanks for anyone who took the time to read all this! Appreciate any help and insight.

Pay the website owner to remove the forum thread.

Prismatic said:

Pay the website owner to remove the forum thread.

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I never thought about that. I figured owners of forums would be highly against that, but worth a shot I guess. Thanks

PureHustle said:

^^ @Prismatic might be right.



Otherwise you can try building more profiles/accounts on other high DA sites. AKA Vimeo, Imgur, Pinterest, Tubmlr etc. No guarantees, but you can try this out and see if they naturally rank above the neg page.

Otherwise you might want to consider doing SEO on a few pages that are ranking on page 2, or just below the bad review, push it down.

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Yeah that was also going to be something I was going to do. Honestly, I don't know what an SEO agency would do for a year without making profiles on any and all authority sites available, first and foremost. Seems like a fundamental step.

Hello,
Try using different websites that you can leave reviews in order to bury the bad review
IG: Yelp, YellowPages, Google, Glassdoor

Hope this helps

Make couple more good reviews websites and rank. try to push the bad review to the second page.

Or go review on yelp like website and rank them. search for 'parasite ranking'

Deleted member 923340 said:

Make couple more good reviews websites and rank. try to push the bad review to the second page.

Or go review on yelp like website and rank them. search for 'parasite ranking'

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Oh perfect thanks for the search suggestion. I will definitely do more research on this! I haven't even heard the term 'parasite ranking' before.

SoCal Marketing said:

Hello,
Try using different websites that you can leave reviews in order to bury the bad review
IG: Yelp, YellowPages, Google, Glassdoor

Hope this helps

Click to expand...

I'm currently building up their Yelp and I'm going to make accounts for every social media and other high authority pages, and will definitely look into YP and Glassdoor too.

My guess is that to get these pages to rank, they have to 1) be active and 2) have lots of user engagement. I'm going to remain constantly active on his pages and add content 2-5 times a week but do you have any suggestions on getting people to click/engage with these types of sites?

Yes,
Send out emails to your happy customers. Asking them to leave you positive reviews.

Blast the particular link with porn links to make it go down.

Knock the url out

Or phone up - have a civil conversation and give the owner a freebie to take it down.

If you can't get the owner to take it down with offers of monetary reimbursement and you don't want to try and bury it with good reviews, you could try negative search engine optimization.

What I've noticed on most of my anchors if I shoot over 40% direct anchor text to a specific page the page starts to drop for that anchor. So in theory if you shoot hundreds of low-quality porn links at the anchor you don't like it should drop down. This is only a theory of negative search engine optimization I have never tried this before.

Just buy this possibility

He would need to buy loads of porn links to make it drop!

Yeah - try it - however think there is an algo in place that will notice this.

SoCal Marketing said:

Yes,
Send out emails to your happy customers. Asking them to leave you positive reviews.

Click to expand...

We actually have a lot of good reviews but they just don't seem to rank very well. Right now I'm focusing more on just getting his brand accounts on social media and other really high DA sites to rank (Yelp, Imgur, Twitter, etc)

rayee said:

Blast the particular link with porn links to make it go down.

Click to expand...

Vladamir said:

If you can't get the owner to take it down with offers of monetary reimbursement and you don't want to try and bury it with good reviews, you could try negative search engine optimization.

What I've noticed on most of my anchors if I shoot over 40% direct anchor text to a specific page the page starts to drop for that anchor. So in theory if you shoot hundreds of low-quality porn links at the anchor you don't like it should drop down. This is only a theory of negative search engine optimization I have never tried this before.

Click to expand...

I thought about negative SEO briefly but I'm hesitant because 1) it has zero backlinks as it is right now and so I think it could possibly have the opposite effect and boost the rankings for it, and since it has a decent DA (27) but a page rank of 1, the DA is carrying it right now so blasting it with links may boost it like how parasite site ranking works..
Idk I'm still open to try it I guess.

Thanks for the input everybody I'll think about everything you all said

thebat1980 said:

Knock the url out

Or phone up - have a civil conversation and give the owner a freebie to take it down.

Click to expand...

I would reach out to them but its a very strangely moderated forum so there isn't a lot of place to report stuff and all that. Also, I found that this same guy posted several more reviews on other forum sites with the identical title on the same day (like 3-4 years ago) but with different complaints about the company that don't even make sense so now I am pretty sure this was a competitor's doing. Luckily these aren't ranking above the 2nd page.

Blast spam links to that particular webpage with your bad review. So the page will do down...

haha pay him off! If that works you gotta let me know