Managing Bad News Articles On the Web

Is a negative article dragging down your reputation? Learn about managing bad news articles and what you can do to stop negative news from destroying your image. 

Have you been in the news lately? Perhaps it was due to an arrest for which you were later acquitted. Perhaps there was some issue that your business was involved with which made it into the press.

Either way, thanks to the Internet, those articles can continue to show up on the front page of Google, haunting you for months or even years after the incident has passed. This can affect everything from a job search to your company’s bottom line.

Managing Bad News Articles Isn’t What It Used to Be

This wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, most people would throw the paper away shortly after reading it. People who wanted to dig through the archives would have had to spend hours scrolling through microfiche at the library. It was possible for a big problem to be forgotten in time.

How Do I Manage Bad News NOW?

In some cases, the answer can be to create fresh news articles that will push down old, negative articles in the Google results. To do this, of course, you’d need to do or create something that is newsworthy. This might allow for the creation of a press release or even the creation of an article in the local paper which appears online.

Generating news is a little easier for a business than for an individual. A business has a lot of resources to sponsor events, donate to charity, offer new apps and online tools or launch strategies that make it into the business pages of a local paper.

Individuals may be able to get some traction by writing a book, making a noteworthy donation to a local organization, heading up a community event or getting involved with a neighborhood play. You might also start writing a column for papers that appear in Google News if you have the talent to do so.

Any positive press can help chase away those older stories, burying them. However, these options won’t be available to everyone, and not everyone can generate enough positive news to successfully manage the Google news results.

Bad News Article Removal

That’s where removal efforts come in. Though it isn’t always easy to convince news outlets to remove archived content there are ways to approach the situation. For example, a news outlet’s website might be willing to use the program snippet that tells Google to ignore the content rather than deleting it outright.

Individuals are rarely successful at doing this on their own, however. You will usually be more successful if you have a company backing you, one who speaks the language and one who knows who to speak to. If you’re not confident that you can generate enough news to bury these articles, contact InternetReputation.com. The news shouldn’t follow you for the rest of your life, not when you have other options.