PDF in search results?

[800GoldLaw]

Hello community!

I am not an SEO professional, though I am a practitioner, I would say. I am seeking a solution on behalf of a friend. If you search the term "Peter Blatt" you will discover a "black eye" on the first page, towards the bottom of SERPs. It's a PDF published on the Florida Department of Financial Services website regarding the final order for a settlement he and his company ("Blatt Financial Group") reached with the state as it related to professional conduct allegations.

Does anyone have any advice on how to address this? I don't want "game" the search engines, but at the same time, this document looks really scary and much worse than it actually is to people, and I would love for it do drop below page one.

Any advice or suggestions from the community?

Thanks!

Tom

[CleverPhD]

You need to create other social profiles or websites that talk about Blatt Financial group and get them to rank above the page in question.   You essentially need to crowd them out as your main option.

[Alick300]

Hi Thomas,

I'm completely agreed with above suggestion. I just would like to share one link that will guide you to implement above suggestion.

The Definitive Guide to Online Reputation Management

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[MoosaHemani]

If I would be at his place, I would have created more social profile or may be a new page on my website targeting the keyword and get some links to the page so that when someone search for a keyword they find social profiles and other pages instead of that PDF.

MY advice is to create About.me page, Linkedin Profile, Twitter Profile, Website Page (targeting the specific keyword) and more. As social profiles have higher DA they are more likely to rank better as compare to that PDF.

When more social profile and website pages will rank better as compare to the PDF< the PDF will moved to the 2^nd page of Google and more and more people might not be able to see that.

Hope this helps!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Thomas,

I have done a lot of this over the last few years - removal of negative / unwanted search results. You effectively need to bury it, as suggested above. I have a little info on my own site here if it helps.

Profiles that I create to help in these circumstances:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Wordpress
• Blogger
• Youtube Channel
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Tumblr
• Flickr
• Reddit

Google+ posts specific to the search phrase (place phrase in first 50 characters)

However, don't forget to add some content to your profiles. Just creating empty profiles probably wont cut it for you. I would also advise interlinking your profiles to help give them a boost.

You can also write something specific to the subject and use a Google News Submission service (Press Release Distribution) as this can also rank quite highly with a specific subject.

-Andy

[rjonesx. 0]

Reiterating the points above, it appears that the domain names...

peterblatt.com
peterblatt.org
peterblatt.net

Are all available. He could throw up a blog on the first, do some charitable work on the second, and highlight all his social stuff (bringing in twitter, instagram, etc. feeds) on the 3rd.

[anthonydnelson]

Tons of good suggestions here. Some profiles that can easily move up high in the SERPs for a non-competitive name search can be:

LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, About.me, Product Hunt, Medium, Pinterest.

Create a few of these, and link to them from the exact match domains, mentioned by Russ.