Table of Contents
Last Update August 29, 2026
Where Negative Results Come From
How a Negative Result Hurts You
There are many reasons that you may want to manage your online reputation. What do we mean by online reputation?
Since the internet has become interactive, meaning customers can interact with website owners; you must be weary of negative feedback and do everything in your power to manage your reputation on the organic search engine results. One post from an irate customer can tarnish your online business.
Everyone has seen the “Rip off Reports” about shady business on the web. Well anyone can post a Rip off Report about your company.
These posts tend to rank high in the search engines because this is an authoritative site. This can be bad if your business has a rip off report rating.
Now whenever someone searches for your company website, the negative report will show up on the search results, usually in the top three results. This is detrimental and can have huge consequences.
There are a number of other ways a negative report about your business can hurt you. What about a Better Business Bureau low rating, Yelp reviews, negative forum posts, Craig’s List posts, etc. all get indexed within the search engines quickly and tend to rank high.
If these sites did not rank so high organically in the search engines then it would not be such a problem, but since they are authority sites they tend to dominate the organic search results.
The consequences of having negative reviews means that customers will be weary to shop from your store or to do business with you. They may even tell friends, family, or coworkers not to shop at your store due to a bad experience or negative reviews.
Would you want to buy from a store without positive rankings? I think not.
So why would anyone else on the web buy from a site that has received negative feedback.
A good way to check if your site has any negative reviews is to type in different variation of your website/ company name in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Scroll through the first three pages to see if anything bad sticks out.
If something does, then you must take corrective action immediately to thwart these sites.
Now that you are aware of negative feedback and the impact it can have on your business you may be wondering what you can do to avoid this. The simplest and easiest solution is to personally manage any complaints against you company and ensure that angry customer problems are resolved.
Unfortunately, sometimes this is not possible and the customer is angry and wants to do everything in their power to spread the word about your service. This means you have to fight back, by building or promoting existing pages for those specific keywords that are bringing up the negative feedback.
You can create new sites and make sure they are tailored around specific keywords that bring up negative feedback about your site. Promote these new sites by building links and adding the new sites to directories and other authoritative websites.
The other solution is to review the sites just below the negative feedback and try to push those sites up the rankings. Promoting and building back links to these sites can achieve this.
In time these sites will surpass the negative results and dominate the search results.
Pushing a negative result down works best when your own pages are strong, so pair this with these 10 steps to increase your Google rankings.
If this is relevant to you, 9 SEO Strategies That Can Be Put Into Action for Increased Organic Traffic covers the related ground.
These methods should help remove any negative feedback or remarks about you or your company from showing up on the search results. Remember that this is an ongoing process and the negative feedback will start to reappear if you do not continue to monitor the new sites that replaced the negative feedback.
This will show your customers that you truly care for them and will increase sales, revenue, and ultimately your business’s bottom line.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you remove negative search results?
Genuine removal is rare. Content you do not control comes down only if it breaches the host platform’s policies or the law, or if the author agrees.
The realistic approach is suppression: strengthening pages you do control so they occupy the positions above it. That takes months and works better than any takedown request.
Can you get a bad review removed?
You can get a bad review removed only if it violates the platform’s policies, such as being fake, containing abuse, or coming from someone who was never a customer. Flag it with a specific reason rather than a general complaint.
Reviews that are simply negative but honest will stay, and responding well to them publicly usually does more good than removal would.
How long does reputation repair take?
Months rather than weeks. Suppressing a result means building pages strong enough to outrank it, which follows normal SEO timelines.
Results on authoritative platforms are hardest to displace. Starting early matters, because the work is far easier before a negative result has accumulated links and age.
