No Such Thing As Bad Press?

So there's a mythic wisdom that says there's no such thing as bad press- that if they're talking about you, they're thinking about you, and that's a good thing.

I don't know if that was ever true, but it's nowhere near true since Google came around.

Let me tell you a story about a Client. They've been in business a long time; they're leaders in the field. Good people doing honest business. Three of their retail customers wrote letters to the consumer advocate columnist at the downtown paper, who wrote a column about it.

In the old days, a bad newspaper column had a shelf life. Eventually, it became yesterday's news and faded away. Not any more.

If you go to Google and type in the name of the business, the first thing that comes up is the archived copy of the negative newspaper article, right on top of the website's listing. This is a new development that has significant implications. Any text-based story about your business may last forever in Google.

What can you do about it? Not much. If the story's truly inaccurate, you might persuade the offending paper's webmaster to contact Google and ask them to remove the article from the archive.

You can also try to fill the space with legitimate good news and success stories. Does your website include testimonials from satisfied customers? Can you provide links to positive press and make sure that those good news stories are indexed by the search engines?

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