Yes, they do.

Here is an excerpt from Google’s blog, where this issue is being discussed:

If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.

This is the clearest endorsement I have ever seen from Google concerning a Search Engine Optimization matter. Sure they offer SEO advice, but often their advice can be interpreted one dozen ways.

I think that in this case, there is only one translation. Google does endorse pushing the positives up in the search results and the negatives down in the search results, in order to shield your online reputation from the negative effects of bad reviews or bad press.

Learn more about how we can help you manage your online reputation.

Everyday it seems, people are asking me the optimum numbers of inbound links they need to acquire for their website in order to rank well in Google.

My answer is going to seem a little flip, but it is the honest answer.

Answer: You need more inbound links – of equal or higher quality – than what your competitors have.

Albert Einstein argued that any mathematical formula that required pages of calculations did not contain within it “the mind of God”.

So when Albert Einstein developed E=mc2, then Einstein had fulfilled the promise of a simple formula that could encompass the brilliance of God.

When people wonder as to how many inbound links they might need to acquire in order to rank in the Top 4 of Google’s search results or even the Top 10 of Google’s SERPs, they are generally hoping that someone will be able to give them a numeric answer, so that they know whether they can afford to undertake the process or not.

I understand the WHY of the question, but there is no canned answer that will work for everyone.

Remember, your competitor may be asking the same question and undertaking the same processes as you are, trying to accomplish the same goal.

No one can truly begin to understand the answer to this question, until one has take the time to do an Inbound Link Comparison Analysis of all of your competitors in the Top 10 spots of Google’s SERPs.

• You need to look at the Top 10 listings in Google for a particular keyword.
• You need to do backlink checks for all ten URLs in Google’s search listings, and you need to check those numbers across a variety of sources, including Google, Yahoo and any other tool you can find to do a check. (Google and Yahoo both tend to understate the actual link counts. While Yahoo will show you more than what Google does, they also show a number of “no consequence” links in their results.)
• You need to look at the quality of a few of the pages that offer links to the URLs in the search results.

This is not an easy process to undertake. I have done it before, but the best you can hope for is a snapshot of what is out there, and therefore, what you need to accomplish.

Note: If Wikipedia turns up in your search query, few people with small budgets will ever be able to dislodge Wikipedia in the search results. What they make up for in a small number of inbound links, they more than make up for with links from dozens or hundreds of PR4, PR5 and PR6 pages. Wikipedia is the king of Internal Linking and they use that to a great degree to rank extraordinarily high in Google’s search listings.

Your analysis should seek to cover how many links a site has to it.

As a general rule of thumb, Google will show you less than 1% of the existing number of links for a web page. Yahoo will show closer to 5% of the existing number of links for a web page, but they will not show you the highest quality of those links.

So, as you strive to gain a snapshot picture of the playing field, you want to take Google’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 100. Then you want to take Yahoo’s Inbound Links number and multiply that by at least 20, then cut the number in half to acknowledge the number of worthless crap links they have in their database. Once you have achieved these two numbers, then I tend to call the truth “somewhere in the middle“.

With your “somewhere in the middle” number in hand, then you need to look at the quality of links to a few of those search listings, to get an idea of whether those links exist on higher quality pages or simply junk pages.

If those links are on junk pages, then the goal could be achieved by just working the numbers. But if there are a lot of high PageRank pages in the mix, then whatever number is in your hand, should be multiplied, perhaps 100-fold, to overcome the quality of pages that link to your competitors.

If you get the idea that my simple formula leads to a complicated answer, then you are right.

All of the numbers that I have included in my sample formula are based on speculation, as the snapshot offers you your best hope of understanding the challenge in front of you.

While the number of inbound links may be relatively easy to determine, the link quality is a factor that is really hard to pin down.

• If you determine that you only need 300 inbound links to rank with the big boys, you may be right.
• Your 300 inbound links number should also be quantified against the number of links that Google will count worthy, so you may need 1200 links to get 300 links that Google will deem worthy. This calculation depends more on the quality of your content than the quantity of your content.
• When all is said and done and your 300 Google-worthy links have not yet put you on page one, then you know that the quality of the links pointing at your competitors is greater than the quality of the links pointing to you.

If you were hoping for an easy answer, I am sorry that I could not help you with that.

But with this explanation of the challenge, you may be better prepared to answer the big question, the question that is really on your mind:

Are my hopes of achieving good rankings in Google within my reach?

I tend to throw “worry” to the wind and just start working. I don’t worry if I can afford to do it or not. I simply start doing, and I know that in one year or five, I will have built enough value in my website that my competitors are going to be the ones who are trying to figure out if they can unseat me!

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If you are looking for Online Reputation Management services for your website, we can help.

We have a long track record of helping pages to rank on page one of Google. Let us put our expertise to work for you, to clean the negative impressions of your name, company or website from Google’s search results.

Please take time to review our services.

You know, if there are listings in Google’s search results that are hurting your business, you might think that there is nothing you can do about that. But let me assure you that given the will and the desire, there is plenty you can do about those search engine results that may be hurting your business.

So many people look at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a game of influencing the keywords that are important to their business, but they don’t realize that SEO can be used to diminish the negatives in the search results also.

Remember that guy who bought your product 3 years ago, and he did not follow the instructions for use, and then complained about how your product let him down? He could be hurting your business right now.

How do you measure the sales that your business is losing, because some guy complained on some website about how your product or service is “crap”.

Ah… I remember when I was selling TV’s for a living.

There was this fellow who came into the store and bought a 52-inch projection screen TV. We had a bonded delivery crew on hand to help people get their purchases home, but although this guy had just spent $2400 on a television set, he decided that he did not want to pay $40 for delivery of his new TV set. I bet you can see where this story is going…

So, we loaded his new TV in the back of his pickup, and he proceeded to tie down his TV in the back of his pickup truck.

He thanked us for his TV and started the drive home.

45 minutes later, our most recent happy customer pulled into the parking lot, toting a big-screen TV box.

As we went to meet him at the door, we could hear the glass falling as the box moved across the floor.

He was pissed! And to our surprise, we were at fault!

You might be asking yourself why we were at fault. That is a good question, one I even posed at the time.

We were at fault, because we did not offer free delivery!

A gust of wind had caught his box, snapping the twine that he had used to tie it down, blowing his $2400 Phillips Big-Screen TV onto the highway.

It was our fault, because we should have given him free delivery. Never mind that we had already given him a $300 discount on the purchase of his TV.

We had offered him bonded delivery, but he refused, and now it was our fault that his TV was broken.

The store where we worked was one of those chains that keep all of the power to make things right at the home office. We could not simply exchange his TV, without permission from our superiors. If we had authorized the exchange with the guy, without the District Manager’s permission, the company would have taken the cost of the Television out of the salesperson’s and the manager’s paycheck.

I was the assistant manager, and I was NOT going to pay for this guy’s broken television. The company did not pay me enough to fix this problem for them, out of my own pocket.

We called the DM. Of course, even though we worked until 10 at night, the DM went home at 6pm. So, we kept dialing his cell phone number, until he answered the phone.

He was pissed, but that was okay. We were already dealing with “pissed”, so we did not mind two people pissed at the same time.

Thank God I was not the manager in charge that night. Thank God for small favors…

Our District Manager said the guy was tough out of luck. I am glad I don’t work for those clowns anymore.

I agree that it should not have been our responsibility, but surely we could find a solution for this guy. After all, he just spent $2400 with us.

Nope. The District Manager said No, then he said No, and he said No again.

So, the DM hung up telling us not to call him again that evening. And we were left with the poor guy who had just signed a two-year finance contract on a TV that was busted to hell.

Yes, I bet the guy pays for delivery next time. But the story does not end here.

The story now moves online. It moves into the newspaper. It moves onto our sales floor for more than a week. It goes ballistic…

The customer went home that night, and turned to the power of the Internet with his complaint. A few days later, he followed his Internet complaints with a paid advert in the local newspaper. Our store was getting skewered.

The guy was in the store every day, throwing a tantrum. And he was spending his money and his time to skewer us for letting him make a foolish decision.

It just worked out well for him. On about his tenth trip to the store, throwing his daily tantrum in front of people who were looking to buy a TV, he just happened to arrive on a day that the DM was in the building. Ah… A new face behind the counter. The customer picked out the new face in the building as being someone over us. And wham, he let in.

Persistence paid off in this case.

He overwhelmed the District Manager with his complaints.

The District Manager broke down and did only what the District Manager could do for our customer. He used his privileged status to type in the appropriate commands into the computer and make things right for this guy.

In the end, we got him a new television for the price of delivery to his house.

The store ate the cost of the new television. (I ended up paying a portion of the TV anyway, because the bookkeeping department deducted the price of the television from the sales sheets for the month, so some of my monthly bonus was lost when that man’s television was cut from the store’s profits.)

The victory that we received was that the guy was not in the store every day scaring away our customers.

But that victory came only after we took a serious hit in our Reputation Management. Every person that guy talked to for the ten days after his purchase, up until he got his replacement, knew that he had a bad experience with us. What is more, everyone who read his paid advert in the newspaper knew that he had a problem with our store. Even more, who knows how long his complaint survived online…

You know what they say, “What is posted online, stays online.”

I left my job at that store in 2005. That store closed in 2008.

I am not going to say that the store closed on account of that guy’s complaints. But I am willing to say that the store was hurt by the guy’s complaints. He did manage to drive a lot of prospective customers out of our store, during his daily rants. (I just checked and could not find his complaints online anymore.)

I am willing to bet that the store closed due to the recession. It closed about the same time that Circuit City bit the dust.

I think this story clearly illustrates that a problem does not have to be your fault, in order for your business to pay a high price, as a result of the problem.

To help illustrate the extent of this problem, I just typed into Google the name of my favorite local restaurant, the name of my town, and the word “sucks”.

I saw dozens of Google search results that were in effect saying that my favorite restaurant “sucks”. Many of them went to describe this restaurant as having the “worst food ever.”

Wow!

Now to be sure, restaurants everywhere suffer from this treatment. And the big name brand restaurants can survive, because their customers have a different opinion.

But what if you are a local restaurant or an obscure internet company?

As an permanent online fixture, I tend to be jaded about the complaints I read about others. But I have to admit, while one or two complaints will not sway me, several complaints in the search results will even cause me to hesitate.

Can you afford for jaded internet marketers like myself to hesitate?

You can bet that if we” jaded internet marketers” are hesitating to purchase what you sell, those “who are not internet marketers by profession” are running away from you!

Fixing The Problem

You are already aware that by utilizing SEO techniques that you can help your website rank better for some keywords in Google and the other search engines.

But did you know that you can also create a wealth of positive reviews for your business on a variety of web pages, and to get those positive reviews to rank higher in the search engines than the negative reviews.

This is how we can help you.

We will use our SEO expertise to get the positive reviews of your website to outrank the negative reviews of your website. If we get enough positive reviews to occupy the top of the search results for your target keywords, then those negative reviews of your website will be buried on page two, three, four, five or six of Google’s search results.

If people will never see the negative reviews of your website, product or service, then as far as most people are aware, there are not any negative reviews.

If there are no negatives about your business, then everything is positive.

You are in control of your business’ reputation online, if only you are willing take the reins and force the negatives down in the search results.

We know that not everything in the search results is true or honest. After all, the guy with the broken TV was blaming us for his bad judgment. We know that you may not deserve what is in Google’s search results that is affecting your online reputation in a negative way.

Let us help you get the negatives out of the sight of your prospective customers. Because as long as those negatives exist in Google’s search results, there is a good chance that someone is going to let those negatives prevent them from buying from you!

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Let us Improve Your Online Reputation, by making the negatives disappear.

You never quite understand why people are willing to spend so much of their time chasing after you in the search engines to drive away your business.

Have you ever looked yourself up in the search engines? Have you seen search results that you are afraid could hurt your reputation and your business?

I have.

There are two fellows out there in America Land who share my name, Bill Platt.

• One is a car nut, who people swear is an @##&*!$. He is not me, but people swear that he is not a nice guy.
• Another is an upstanding member of the Republican Party, who said something really nasty about Obama during the 2008 campaign. I don’t know what he said, and I don’t care really.

The point is that there are two guys out there, who will turn up in the search engines if you search for my name. If I thought that there would be a problem with them being mixed up with me, then I would probably take action to get them out of the search results. But, I am fairly well established, and I don’t think anyone will confuse me with them.

In your case, things might be a bit different.

In your case, you might be turning up on the same page as someone being outed for being a crook. You might share a name with one of America’s Most Wanted. Here is an example:

I got on the idea for this type of service when a fellow contacted me to ask if I could help him combat his search engine troubles. He lives in Arizona, and he is getting mixed up with a guy in New York, who got in trouble with the Feds over a money scam.

It is bad enough in his case that his identity is being mixed up with a felon, but then one of his previous customers (a student at his school) got mad, because she got a diploma from his school and now she cannot find a job. As if that is the teachers fault, right?

So the student is thrashing out at the school, which gave her an education, because she cannot find a job.

Now the student is chasing the school around online, trying to connect the dean of the school to the felon in New York.

It does not matter that the connection is not true. It does not matter that the dean is seeking legal recourse in the matter.

What matters is that anytime someone finds the school, then wants to find out more about it, they generally drop the name of the school into Google, and viola, they are told that the school is operated by a felon who stole money from folks.

It is not the same guy, but it does not matter. It does not matter, because people can SEE THE LIE, and they have no reason not to BELIEVE THE LIE.

At the time I was approached about doing this, I was not in a position to help. So the fellow who called me had to find someone else to help him. (I received that call 2 years, before I started doing SEO.) This happened a long time ago, but the story tends to repeat itself online – all the time.

If people are typing your name or the name of your business into the search engines and seeing search listings that undermine your credibility, then you are losing sales.

This is how we can help you.

We can use our expertise in SEO to make the pages – that are undermining your ability to do business – disappear from the search results.

We do not employ any Blackhat SEO methods, to accomplish this end.

Instead, we seek out the positive mentions of your name or company, and then we use the SEO processes that work for us to push the positive reviews UP IN THE SEARCH ENGINES.

Because the positive reviews of you or your business are on the climb, it is just a matter of time, before the bad reviews start disappearing into lower pages in the search results.

If people cannot see any Negative Posts about you or your company, then those negatives will never enter the mind of your prospects. Out-Of-Sight … Out-Of-Mind.

If we cannot find any positive reviews of you or your company online, then we will create the positive reviews of you or your company, then we will push those new pages up in the search results to replace the negative press.

The process is all about Managing Your Reputation in the search engines.

When we are successful at improving the good press and pushing the bad press Out-Of-Sight, then you will be able to close more sales. It is as simple as that.

Let us help you Clean Your Online Reputation.