Reputation Management 101: How To Remove Scam and RipOff Report Pages From Search Engines

Someone just told you they Googled your name or product and found a negative review with “Your Name Scammer” on the front page. You’re probably thinking, “How can I remove this result from the search engines?” Short answer: you can’t. Long Answer: you can push it down.

Fact is, you can’t just “remove” a result from Google unless it’s violating a copyright infringement of some kind. If they’re displaying a copyrighted image on the page, for example, you can file a DMCA request but some owners will simply remove the image and leave the review. If the owners don’t respond, you can file a DMCA directly through Google to have the page removed from the search engine’s results.

However, the above option is rare. The common solution these days is to simply “push” the bad review towards the 3rd or 4th page of Google since few customer make it past the 2nd or 3rd page of Google’s search result. But how do you do this? The answer is: be creative.

How to Make Scammy Pages ‘Disappear’ From Search Results

Step 1: Get Some Long Articles Written

First, you need around 20 articles written on the topic of “Your Name”. You can have these articles written on oDesk, VWorker, ArticleZ or anywhere else. You can even ask friends to write it. You’ll need 700-1200 word articles for this to work properly.

Step 2: Grab Some New Domains with Free Hosting

Second, you’re going to need around $80 to purchase 10 domains with variations of “Your Name”. For example, try snatching up the following domains:

• YourNameReview.com
• YourNameReviews.com
• YourNameResults.com
• YourNameIndex.com
• YourNameHQ.com
• YourNameInc.com
• etc, etc, etc

You need to purchase the 10 domains from different domain registrars that offer a free web page with purchase. Why? Because each registrar will give you free hosting space on a different IP address. If you put all these sites on your one host, they’ll all share the same IP or similar IP’s and Google will not rank each site as well. You may want to consider also purchasing Private Domains so Google can’t connect the owners of the domains with the same person or company.

Step 3: Build Each Domain Site Using the Articles and Simple SEO Strategies

Next, take the 20 articles you wrote and put 1 article on each domain. All that really matters is that you have Privacy, Terms of Use and Contact pages on each web site. Make sure they’re all slightly different so there aren’t any footprints that point to the same owner. You should have 10 articles left over….more on that later.

For simple SEO, do the following:

• Make sure each page has “Your Name” in the title, keyword and descriptions.
• Make sure each article has an H1 and H2 tag with “Your Name” in it.
• In the first and last paragraph, bold and underline “Your Name”.
• Add photos named “your-name.jpg” with an Alt tag called “Your Name”.
• Do not add Google Analytics or Adsense since Google can “connect the dots” on your domains using these tools.

Step 4: Build 3rd Party Sites

Remember the last 10 articles? You can use these to create articles at HubPages, Squidoo, Blogger, TypePad, Live Journal, WordPress.com, Weebly, Tumblr, Blog.co and  EzineArticles. This is also a good solution for people that don’t have $80 to buy the domain names. However, keep in mind these sites can kick you out any time they want.

Step 4: Build Some Backlinks to the Web Sites

Finally, let the sites sit for a week to see what gets indexed and what doesn’t. Most of the sites should slowly rise to the top. If they don’t, you’ll need to gently nudge them with some backlinks. The free account at OnlyWire should serve this purpose well. Just don’t go nuts with backlinks since Google doesn’t like to see sites build backlinks too quickly these days.

That’s it. By following the method above, you’ll be able to “push back” the old, bad review and replace it with new sites that speak highly of you. I just hope you deserve such praise. 🙂