A few years back, I was doing SEO for a charming bed and breakfast in Toronto. However, despite their charm and hospitality they had a confrontation with a very unsatisfied customer. They tried everything to accommodate them but once this person decided they hated the inn their paths were forever locked. The person happened to be a major blogger and went about posting negative reviews and articles about the inn. Google of course ranked the articles and whenever other customers did a search for the B&B’s name the blogger’s articles would come up along with the B&B’s actual web site. This obviously caused the loss of a lot of business for them. So the B&B then asked what could be done to get the articles removed. Google won’t remove them because we weren’t the original authors. So the next option was to attack and discredit the blogger. Many companies take this approach but I recommended against it because the result could be a full fledged war with the blogger and blogger’s seem to have an endless amount of time to waste on writing pointless articles.
The approach we took was to try reverse Googling. The purpose of reverse Googling, anti-Google, or anti-SEO is to bury negative pages in a sea of positive reviews and articles. The idea behind the name is the reverse Googler is trying to reduce the ranking of targeted page or site. Reverse Googling requires a bit of SEO finesse because you must write articles that will appear on other sites usually not owned by you that will rank better the negative ones. Optimizing when you lack full control of the site is tricky but good SEO can do it. Generally, one advantage the SEO has over those that write negative comments is the intent. SEO are focused on making the article rank for targeted keywords. The blogger is focused on their writing skills that generally hold more influence over readers and not search engines. The anti-Google trick can be used also as a means to promote products via negative terms see the article on Internet Scam
Just a note the article was inspired by Ed Obuz newbuzz who I was chatting with about an client’s trouble with burying a negative article on Google. He coined the term anti-Googling.
Any questions about the reverse Googling, please feel free to contact me at 905-417-9470 or by email at allanp73@gmail.com
