Pushing your search results down? Not being found on Google, Yahoo!, MSN or other search sites? Companies spend many thousands of dollars to ensure they get found and stay found. Many hours of effort and many hours of careful planning, writing, coding and linking go into upping ones results to the top. So why would a company or organization want to push their search results down? Turns out there’s a few reasons. And it’s not very easy at all.

So why would an organization want to lower their search results? Get pushed to page 3 or 4 or deeper? For the most part, it’s for reputation management. More pointedly because they don’t want negative information about the company, organization or product to be found. While bad news is good news for news media outlets, it can be just plain bad for a company on the Web. Benetton always said “any press is good press”, but today, with the concept of Web 2.0 being all about sharing, bad news can spread wider than ever before, across many borders, faster and into many different stakeholders hands. And it can linger. A very long time.

Another reason we’ve found for pushing results down is campaigns and promotions that have reached expiry and the organization wants to move on to newer campaigns or products. This comes in to play in terms of the Long Tail marketing. While it’s good to keep old products selling (one can assume significant cost efficiencies have by then been gained enabling better margins) a company wants new editions, versions and types of products to sell. With the Web, many social media and other sites linking back to an old product can lower the results on the newer product or service. Pushing that product down in targeted engines can be of benefit to a marketer.

Pushing search results down however, can be as hard as getting them to the top. The upside however, is that once you’ve pushed a result down on a term or keyword, it’s more likely to continue to decline and therefore takes less ongoing work. The strategies and tactics used vary, from actively forcing de-linking on certain sites to finding more aggressive ways to push an alternative story or view. In terms of reputation management tactics, it is harder and a with any good SEO work, it doesn’t happen overnight. Nor can the results be guaranteed - anyone who says they can is likely lying to get your money. Plain and simple.

Deciding to push results down, especially in terms of a negative story, is not a light decision and must considered carefully. Planning and following through on that plan over time is a critical component. Added to that is the need to find a good reputation management firm or SEO firm that understands how to undo good SEO work that was targeted at raising results.