Getting a link removed from brand search - please help!

[palicomp]

Hello all you mozzers! Ive just come into work with an established company who have one major problem when you google "palicomp" the second link that comes up is to consumeractiongroup with a thread that has been damaging the business for over 2 years, this thread is absolutely not representative of the business today.

Strangely stronger links in search have better authority but google has ranked this post as being highly relevant to the business, does anybody know of any strategies we can do to get this removed, we have contacted consumeractiongroup directly but they are not prepared to move it.

Does anyone have any idea of removal ideas or what we can do its crippling our business, we cant work out as to why its ranking better!

Chris

[AndyMacLean]

Hi,

The 3rd time I googled it I got this http://screencast.com/t/Y6PERH67F29M

Maybe one way would be to start another 'discussion' i.e. forum thread on a high authority domain site (probably not SEOMOZ!) to oust that particular 'discussion' search result. Notice the markup on the search result: 20 posts - 2 authors - 11 Oct 2010? Look for another forum that uses the mark up - a more recent forum page would be more trusted for their potential consumers.

People searching for the company name are likely just looking for the website link and probably wont look too far down the page - what about doing some link building/social shares for the pages that rank in 3rd & 4th place? A quick check shows me that those pages only have 0-2 external links pointing to them, so should be quite easy to move them up and the negative one down potentially.

Also I see no ppc ad for that term from the Palicomp. Why not add one and inc your great customer service in the content - its likely to be cheap cpc's and you could push the negative search result further down the page if Google shows that ad and the one from pcspecialist.co.uk.

Good luck,

Andy

[palicomp]

Hi Andy, thanks for this, there where several positive forum posts written more recently including high posts that had more replies, content and visitors than this ranked thread - on the same website.

One of our biggest concerns is we have had many issues with this thread so we know customers see it, but our customer base is tech savvy and with trust in ecommerce ever increasing people are hunting the brand in SERPS - not only this they feature in a lot of magazines so branded searches are still our highest conversion.

PPC is definately an option for us, branded will cost us less, we are thinking of utilizing social which hasnt been touched since before i started, so some potential there - thanks for your great idea on social share and links to reviews, if we keep this relevant i hope this will have some impact.

We are trying to reach the owner of the thread in question too as this customer was not only refunded but was given a full apology and their problem was fixed

Fingers crossed!

Chris