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Hi There,

I have work on a lot of reputation management for my clients and negative reviews is an on-going battle.  There are a few things you can do to improve things for your client.

The quickest and easiest way is to published fresh, relevant and current news about the brand.  If you are distributing press releases or news stories through the right channels you will get great coverage.  If possible ty to avoid the free publishing sites as many of them are are associated with other negative attributes.  If you have a budget to work with I would recommend PRWeb, Marketwire or 24/7PressRelease wire.

I have successfully pushed negative reviews off page 1 in Google by using well writen, relevant and news-worthy press releases.

I have also had some good results with Google+, by linking google plus into the brands exposure Google will give a high ranking position for the Google+ brand page and even display images.  I have found this diverts people away from negative reviews.

Has your client responded to the negative review? Offered a refund, apologised etc etc. Often a reviewer will remove the complaint etc if handled in the right way

Also, depending on your location (and local laws) some review sites will amend the title tag that shows up in a Google result to make is less 'nasty' to avoid a legal battle with the brand.

There are a lot of things that can assist with negative reviews - hope you find some of the above helpful

SEO 101

The first thing to do once you have built the website is submit a sitemap to Google.

If you are using Wordpress or similar there are a lot of free plugin's you could use to do this automatically for you. It important to have a sitemap so that search engines can navigate your website effectively and index each page.

Or the old fashioned way is to google 'submitting URL to google' and copy and pasting each URL.  (not the best way but still can work).

To check which pages are indexed try site:http://www.aplacetorent.ie

Once google knows you exist you need to ensure you are targeting the right keywords for your market.

You can use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/keyword-density-tool.html to check the keyword density for your on-page SEO. And then ensure your are using the same or similar keywords as the anchor text for inbound links to the site.

Next, ensure all of your social media sites are integrated into the website.  Search engines are placing more and more importance on social presence so definitely get on top of that.

I work with a few clients in Ireland and find Google loves adverts.ie and boards.ie so see if you can use their services in anyway to assist with your link building efforts.

Hope this gives you something to start with

This is exactly what I have been searching for. Thanks so much!

Thanks Marcus.

It is wordpress I am using and already have the Yoast WP plugin. I'll try nondexing the author and date taxonomies too.

I have done so with the tags but they still show up on the SEOmoz report.

Good idea about varying the categories - will give that a go and see if anything changes

I agree with Miriam.  I have had success with landing pages for different cities / countries with a few different clients.

Perhaps also try some inbound links from .ca for your canadian pages and .co.uk for your London city landing page.

I've used journalism.co.uk for this and it has worked quite well.

I get a lot of duplicate page errors on my crawl diagnostics reports from 'categories' and 'tags' on my wordpress sites.

The post is 1x link and then the content is 'duplicated' on the 'category' or 'tag' that is added to the page.  Should I exclude the tags and categories from my sitemap or are these issues not that important?

Thanks for your help

Stacey