"Fake" market research reports killing SEO

[amelanson]

Our robotics company is in a fast growing, competitive market.  There are an assortment of "market research" companies who are distributing press releases about their research reports (which are of less than dubious quality).  These announcements end up being distributed through channels with high domain authority.  The announcements mention many companies in the space that the purported report covers - including ours.  As a result, our company name and product brand is suffering since the volume of press announcements is swamping our ratings.

What would you do?

• Start writing blog postings on topics and post through inexpensive news feeds?

• Somehow contact the firms posting the contact and let them know they are in violation of our trademarks by mentioning our name?

• Other ideas?

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Is that company does not have your legal permission you can take actions on that, I have the same issue on the past. First I tried to contact the source without any response at the end a court give us a permission to get those articles down using the hosting companies. Example if a site hosted on HostGator use our brand without our permission I can request Hostgator delete that content usually Hostgator deactivate the site  until the content is deleted by the owner

[KaneJamison]

How to react to 3rd party content like this really depends on some other factors such as:

• Is this content showing up for your brand name, or just generic industry terms (if we were talking drones this might be "dji drone reviews" vs "4k drones")?
• Are they saying negative things about your company?
• Is the content obviously slanted or poorly produced? Usually savvy B2B buyers can ignore those on their own.

(I am not a lawyer but) It's not a trademark violation to mention your name without permission, so, you probably don't have much standing. If they're saying bad things about your company, then it really depends on whether they have a good reason for saying whatever they said. Either way - they're probably not going to take it down for you.

The broader question is really about content marketing strategy - how does your company go about producing better content that deserves to rank for whatever phrases these press releases are showing up for? Google doesn't love showing press releases in search results - if you give them something better to rank, and your site has some decent domain authority, you have a good shot of outranking that type of content.

Those are some general thoughts - this is one of those scenarios that depends on more info or specific examples.