I was recently approached by a company asking the question: Can search engine optimization get rid of bad press in the search engine results? The answer is both yes, and no.

While you can’t wipe out the pages themselves from the search engine results (some scoundrels claim they can, but that’s another story), you can help your public relations online by getting rid of those results in a roundabout way. You don’t really need them to disappear, you just need them to sink a few pages back where no one will find it. So how do you do that? Good press. Lots of it that ranks well.

Generally where bad press will really affect you is not the keywords for which you are competing in your niche, but for your name itself. As you cannot have more than a few results on the same page for your site, you must then have high ranking content on other sites for your name.

There are two options available to you, and I suggest making use of both of them to increase the likelihood that the bad press will no longer appear in the first few pages.

1. Create content on another site that uses your company name in the title tag. Press releases are a good example of how businesses might go about this.
2. Create content on your site and submit it to sites that generally rank high in the search engines, such as Digg. Use your company name in the title tag.

It’s that easy… you can even link to these pages so that they achieve higher results as well.  You can also build links, but this must occur in a specific type of directory that gives each site it’s own page generally with the name of your site in the title tag.

And if you really want to spend money, why not get some reviews on blogs with the stipulation that they use your company name in the title of their post.

And that’s what I told them.