The internet is a fascinating place; it can be exciting and terrible by turns. For individuals, it is a place which serves as the gateway to world knowledge. But for companies, it presents a whole cornucopia of ways and means to enhance and improve the performance of their business. By making use of tools such as Google Analytics and Google AdWords, companies look up the most relevant keywords in relation to the goods or services they sell. Once the best keywords have been found (for the particular demographic and country that the company is targeting), the company attempts to use those in the textual content on their websites; and also on promotional articles posted in third-party sites for the purpose of site ranking. The strategic posting of keywords in the content ensures that the readers searching for a particular product or service gets directed towards the site of the company in question. However, like everything else in the world, there’s a flip side to this as well. People normally imagine that use of SEO tools would take them to great heights in regards to online popularity, but there’s also the other side to it. Sometimes rival companies, jealous of their competitors’ success and looking to jeopardize the latter’s sales figures, resort to black hat techniques, such as opening sites with negative and damaging content about the competitor in question. Sometimes they can pay people to post negative reviews on the product review pages of the competitor. This, as can be guessed logically, not only severely harms and damages the reputation of the company, but also prompts Google to downgrade the ranking of the site for qualitative deficiency.

However, all the time it might not be the propaganda and smear-campaign machinery of the rivals at work. Often it so happens that neutral (or third party) review sites contain genuinely disgruntled reviews and feedback from unhappy/disillusioned customers, and these can be brutal at times. And since sometimes Google ranks websites based on the number of incoming links (that redirect to a particular website), these sites which contain bad reviews get listed at the top of search results. It would be better if we illustrate this with an example. Suppose a company X sells clothes. Owing to a serious quality degradation on the part of the company, angry customers write out long, complaining posts on a third-party review site such as, say, RipOffReport.com. These negative reviews would show up near the top of the search results if somebody were to type in a search term called “Company X shoes” or “Company X Shirts”. Besides harming the public perception of the company and its products, bad consumer experience reports will also force Google to drop the ranking of Company X. There are certain sites which list the primarily negative reviews about various e-commerce sites, and are protected by cyber rules and regulations that allow them to advertise negative reviews for the interest of customers. These are the ones which are the most difficult to “wash out”, seeing as these are primarily user-generated.

In order to battle the menace of bad online reviews, companies have taken recourse to encouraging customers with positive experiences to post on as many forums, review sites and social networking platforms as possible, to counter and out-balance the negative ones. Another, more commonly used method is, to for a company to create its own website and then design its content in a manner so as to out-rank the sites which contain negative reviews. The latter work might be done by the company itself or outsourced to other smaller digital marketing concerns. The ways to combat negative publicity of a commercial establishment are detailed out below:

• Take Help of Web 2.0: There are certain sites which almost always come out on top of user search lists. A few examples of such websites are Wikipedia.org, Squidoo etc. Among these, Wikipedia is a sure-shot way to rank in the top of the Google search list. So a company can try building a Wikipedia page that will address the primary curiosities of viewers when they search for the particular company’s name on Google.
• Press Releases: Creating Press Releases with the Company’s homepage URL embedded on it can help to out-rank other websites that mention or describe the firm negatively.
• Flickr and YouTube to the Rescue: It has been found that the creation of videos on YouTube and images on Flickr (which contain the name of the company in the image and video titles) help to rank the company higher up on the search results list.  These videos and images almost always turn up on the first page of Google when the Company’s name is searched; and hence automatically create a positive impression for the company or brand name in the minds of people who see it.
  
• Creating and Innovatively Designing Profile Pages: Creating pages and profiles for the firm on sites such as AOL Hometown, Google Pages, LinkedIn etc. can result in a lot of positive exposure and word-of-mouth for a commercial enterprise.
  
• Blogging Sites: Indulging in guest blogging on reputed blogging sites will feature a lot of links to the original site, which will bring the company website a lot of traffic. This will, to some extent, neutralise the negative publicity that has been generated.
  
• The Route through Content Removal and Replacement: As has been stated before, it is indeed difficult to get rid of or wash out negative feedback or reviews which are submitted on user-generated websites; such as listing and review sites or forums. One can though, ask the administrators of a website to take down negative reviews from a website. If not, they can at least allow the company to post an article which portrays the business in a neutral or negative manner. This content can be optimised to out-rank and wash out the negative reviews on the pages of the same consumer affairs website.

These are, in short, a few things that can be done to counter negative/smear internet campaigns on the internet against a particular company or its product.