What's the best strategy for dealing with old ripoff reports that dominate your name rankings?

[JosephFrost]

We are just now starting to work on our site optimization. There are a lot of old ripoff reports and other complaints that surface, specifically around our name search. Our competitors use this commonly and our clients come accross regularly. We have made management changes, and real changes in the business since then, but we don't know the best way to get our positive news to replace old negative news. Any ideas? Specifics would be great. Thanks,

[CMC-SD]

The general idea is to own the top 7-10 results, since most searchers don't click through to page 2. Make sure you have an active brand page on every social network imaginable. The search engines often rank those well for company name searches. If that's not enough to push the bad reviews to page 2, then you should think about PR opportunities. Can you get some neutral or favorable news coverage?

Always respond (politely, professionally, and accurately) to complaints on ripoff/review sites that allow a response. Honestly, an irate, unreasonable complaint that has a good response can make your business look great. I'm a compulsive Yelp user and I see that all the time there. A company that acknowledges its mistakes and bends over backwards to fix those mistakes is a company I'm happy to work with.

Make sure your site has lots of trust signals. If someone is dubious when they get to your site, the BBB logo can nudge them in a more positive direction. Create a page that details your customer service policies -- returns, refunds, etc. You might want to work this content into cart and checkout pages (assuming it's an e-commerce site).

[irvingw]

"Always respond (politely, professionally, and accurately) to complaints on ripoff/review sites that allow a response."

I respectively disagree. You'll wind up getting a response from the poster most likely and go back and forth with the person online instead of via email and creating more content on that page and Google will push that page higher in the results!Also, once higher more people see it and might chime in as well.

If you feel you must respond don't write it with any of your keywords or company name!

Try to get other content to push it down, ripoff report will never remove your page unless you sue.

[stevefidelity]

How to deal with the complaint directly is a loaded question.

CMC-SD makes valid points... Social media profiles are an easy thing to start off with if you don't already have them. Profiles on websites of professional organization that you belong to can be helpful as well. You also want to build links to these profiles to increase the chance that they show up higher in the SERPs.

Paid advertising on your own brand name can help in a small way in these sense that it will push the organic search results down (assuming your paid ad shows above the organic results), and this measure can oftentimes result in the ripoff report link being pushed below the scroll. If someone is searching on your brand name, most people won't have a need to scroll down.

If it's a really popular ripoff report, there may be links to that individual report that are allowing it to rank higher which will just fuel the fire. You might not be able to get any type of satisfaction from Ripoff Report of the author of the report, but if you use OSE to check out where the links are coming from, there may be an opportunity to contact a webmaster site/owner and convince them to remove the link to the report.