How to make a bad posting drop down the search engines

[ClaireH-184886]

we have had a competitor who has been stealing a lot of content from us and now they have used seo tactics to write a bad article about one of our sites that they have been taking content from, and what we would like to do is to use seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings.

We are consulting a solicitor to take action against them as we are fed up of the content being stolen and the other techniques they are using, can anyone give me ideas on the best way to drop this post down the rankings.

I was thinking about articles and press releases and blog posts to get higher up in the rankings and do a lot of these to drop their article down the rankings.

Our solicitor has already taken action against them in the past and that cost us a fortune and it looks like we are going to have to spend a fortune again, so any help on using seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings would be great.

[ClaireH-184886]

Thanks for this. we did fill out a form with google but heard nothing back. at one time we had 30 sites with the same content as ours, when we contacted one of these sites and threatened them with legal action, they were very worried and a solicitor contacted us and told us that they were given the content by a third party.

I cannot go to much into this for obvious reasons but the company in question is a franchise company who feel scared about the service so they use underhand tactics.

What we need to do is to increase the brand exposure on google so the brand is always displaying in the top of google and people do not see these silly posts or bad articles.

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for this, i have used authorship before, but did not think about using it on that site, so i will start using that and hopefully it could help solve some of the problem

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for that, i will try that

[Anti-Alex]

That's definitely frustrating. I've been in the same boat a number of times and had decent success with a few tactics. Before you start looking at Negative SEO techniques or responding with underhanded tactics, first look at your brand.

Do you feel your brand is stronger and more solid than the copying brand?
Do you have something that's unique that they are unable to copy?

If the answer is yes to both of those questions, then first focus on improving your service and look to make your brand stand out a bit more from the copy. As your brand grows stronger, their brand will get pushed back naturally. Start pushing on social media and engaging your followers to post, comment, and share your posts. This engagement will boost your SEO and the positive comments from your audience will start to show that you offer a better product.

That's the long term solution. In the short term, look and see what they're copying. If they're copying your posts word for word, then you can report that to Google. Google has a Report Copyright page for this:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1&

Google gets to these in time and will eventually drop their pages. You can also DMCA their hosting company if they're clearly copying your articles.

To combat any false negative articles they're writing about you, I would start leveraging social media. If you can get your clientele to start engaging your page, post good comments, and like posts, users who search for your brand will see that you offer a legitimate service. Follow up by writing press releases that link to your social media pages, articles, guest posts, and get the word out that you have fans who've left great feedback.

If you can successfully show that you're better without getting your hands dirty, your brand will be much stronger than the copy. They will eventually fall behind and be unable to keep up. The down side is it takes a bit more effort. However, I've taken the low road before and the problem is you end up just bickering at the same level. Neither company moves ahead because all they do is fight rather than improve their products.

[SoleGraphics]

There has to be a way to integrate authorship  and having content on your site first that would identify their content as "stolen". http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html

[DennisSeymour]

Go for exact match domains, web 2.0 blogs and profiles, and social profiles. Make them legitimate and link to them (or interlink them)

Some should get traction and push the article down. It sucks, but people like that exist in this world, but karma is a b*tch and they will pay for it