SEO Quotient™
Get found on Google

The web is a double-edged sword. What goes around, comes around. People can say great things about you and your website, link to your website, and help promote you and your services. However, disgruntled employees, unhappy clients, and crazy people can just as easily, but with probably more vigor, blast you online as well.

Indeed, if your blog has the word “sucks” in the title, you will immediately get spidered and ranked in other “sucks” websites. Unfortunately, even the best companies with the best customer service and attention to detail has unhappy clients. Sometimes, clients just can’t be pleased. Sometimes, you did make a mistake or one of your employees made a mistake, but whatever you do or did to try to rectify the error just didn’t sit well with the customer. So, they went online and bad-mouthed you.

Somewhere, some statistician made a claim to the effect that a happy client may tell one or two close friends about their experience with you. But, an unhappy client will broadcast their dissatisfaction to 25 strangers. According to the 80/20 principle, 20% of your clients will cause you 80% of your grief. So, it may behoove you to go out of your way to plug holes before they leak.

Is there anything you can do about online complaints? Yes. Is there some kind of web authority that will fix it for you or stop the bad guys from doing it? No. What about slander and libel laws? Well, what about freedom of speech and expression laws, is their response.

The best thing you can do is “own the first page of Google.” How do you do that, you ask? A few ways:

1. Ensure that you optimize your site for your company name
2. Register the domain name, “your-company-sucks.com” replacing your company name
3. Create sub-domains like blog.yourcompany.com, wiki.yourcompany.com
4. Create profiles on social networking sites in the name of your company
5. Create hosted blogs at yourcompany.wordpress.com and yourcompany.blogspot.com
6. Create profiles on social bookmarking sites
7. Work to search engine optimize all of your subdomains and network of blogs

What else can you do to help suppress unflattering comments and derogatory content that relates to your company?

1. Fix your system so that you don’t make future customers unhappy
2. Try to make amends with the people (customers or employees) who are unhappy
3. Ask the webmaster of the website with hate mail and badmouth comments to remove it
4. Contact an attorney and demand untrue, slanderous, or libelous content to be removed
5. Hire a search engine optimization (SEO) consultant to help you suppress bad comments