Google Search Tinkering

So, since I'm relatively new to the IT world, I've been gaining experience by volunteering my free time to provide tech support to local non-profit companies that can't afford to hire an IT worker or consultant. For the most part, the work has been pretty basic, including desktop repair and resolving typical network-related issues.

Last night, one of my clients, an educational institution, informed me that one of their customers was displeased with the program he had enrolled in, and retaliated by writing a hate-filled blog post demonizing the company as a religious cult. It's a completely ridiculous claim, but unfortunately, a Google search of the company now shows the aforementioned blog post as the No. 2 suggestion, behind the company's actual website. As you can imagine, the PR department is not too happy about it, and they have reached out to me and asked if there's anything I can do to keep the post from appearing so close to the top of the search.

My first order of business was to manage their expectations... I explained that this situation was most likely outside of my control, but that I would take the weekend to do some research, and hopefully come back to them with some ideas for them to pursue.

After a day of thought, my best suggestion would be to have them reach out to their customers, specifically those who maintain a blog of their own, and have them write a post discussing their positive experience with the company, in hopes of maybe pushing the negative post further down the suggestions list. In reality though, I'm not familiar with how Google searches function, and I figured I'd reach out to the TE community to see if anyone has had any similar experiences with manipulating Google search results or something similar.

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Comments

paulgswanson

Heres some information regarding the Google Search backend, Google keeps the official algorithm a secret. What we do know is this:

PageRank assigns a rank or score to every search result. The higher the page's score, the further up the search results list it will appear.
Scores are partially determined by the number of other Web pages that link to the target page. Each link is counted as a vote for the target. The logic behind this is that pages with high quality content will be linked to more often than mediocre pages.
Not all votes are equal. Votes from a high-ranking Web page count more than votes from low-ranking sites. You can't really boost one Web page's rank by making a bunch of empty Web sites linking back to the target page.
The more links a Web page sends out, the more diluted its voting power becomes. In other words, if a high-ranking page links to hundreds of other pages, each individual vote won't count as much as it would if the page only linked to a few sites.
Other factors that might affect scoring include the how long the site has been around, the strength of the domain name, how and where the keywords appear on the site and the age of the links going to and from the site. Google tends to place more value on sites that have been around for a while.
Some people claim that Google uses a group of human testers to evaluate search returns, manually sorting through results to hand pick the best links. Google denies this and says that while it does employ a network of people to test updated search formulas, it doesn't rely on human beings to sort and rank search results.

Unforunetly outranking a link like that it is relativley difficult. I would never recommend query poisoning but a good attempt may be to find someone that has a really high page rank and have them write a positive review.

Maybe given the information above you can come up with a good strategy.

YFZblu

I'm not up to speed on how freedom of speech plays out here; but couldn't the non-profit draft a lawyer-ish cease and desist letter, in hopes that it 'scares' the person into removing the blog post?

paulgswanson

Even if the blog post is remved it will still be visible in the google cache and thus be visible with searches

Corrsta

Yeah, I'm not a legal expert, but one of the first things I recommended was that they discuss the issue with their marketing, PR, and legal specialists to explore other avenues for a solution.

paul78

paulgswanson wrote: »

Google keeps the official algorithm a secret. What we do know is this:

I thought Google released their secret algorithm through a patent filing - I think it involves the use of Pigeons - Google Technology

Ok - on a more serious note - @Corrsta - my 2 cents is to not acknowledge the blog post. If the blog is as insane as it sounds, most readers are likely to ignore it as the rantings of someone with some beef. Your clients marketing dollars are better spent on working on better PR which does NOT acknowledge or reference the blog. Even if there are libelous comments, trying to get a cease or desist through the courts simply brings a spotlight to the blog. I usually would not advocate a legal solution.

Corrsta

Great advice and information from everyone. Thank you all for the input.

As I researched other non-profit companies, I noticed some of the most popular search results were from job sites like Monster, Indeed, Jobfox, and CareerBuilder, which allow employees and customers to rate their experiences with the company. Since my client has no presence on these sites, my main recommendation will be to have their staff give the company a high rating coupled with a positive review to help out with search results.