Is this ORM strategy sound?

Hey guys,

Have a client who has some negative news sites (high DA 90+) ranking 3rd and 4th for their brand name.

Articles are old from 2014 and 2010.

They want to decrease these articles in the search results.

They also have lots of positive articles about their company, bit lower DA (50-80) but still solid and they also have a linkedin profile.

Our strategy is to link to 5 of these positive articles, which are also on 1st and 2nd page on Google. And built about 5 links to each. With the anticipation these articles will build some page authority from link building and outrank those negative articles.

Is this a sound strategy? Is there anything else we can also be doing to outrank or even remove (don't mind using some blackhat) these negative articles from the search results?

Any suggestions would be highly appreciated!

Cheers,
AZ

Hey AZ, I haven't ever been able to pinpoint an exact number of links (no matter the quality) that will push a site up or down in the SERPs. I would keep a much more flexible plan rather than a handful of links and expecting the results to move.

The plan is fine, just the expectations.

When I start a campaign, I do everything possible in my power, I don't limit myself to just pushing some specific sites, but rather focus on doing everything possible. Knowing what works ahead of time is vital to me because most of the time we don't want to wait around a couple months while trying to figure out what will rank and what will drive rankings.

Also important to keep in mind that DA isn't a measure of rankings, it's a measure of expected authority of a domain. It's not a Google metric and completely a guess from Moz. Anytime you want, pick a random keyword and look at the DA of the top 10. I can almost guarantee that they won't be in order of DA.