Often times, negative comments (true or false) on blogs can gain prominent rankings in search engines for company trademark names. Many company web site admin or marketing staff scramble on how to address these issues. Some companies do not monitor the rankings of their trademark names in search engines at all.

Market Sentinel offers examples including: "40% of the UK's top grocery brands' feature at least one detractor in their Google top ten" in a new paper authored in conjunction with Weboptimiser. The paper examines the threats to brands posed by blogs and message boards and includes detailed techniques for responding to those threats including using search optimization along with rebuttal techniques such as blogging and RSS.

The paper also looks at applying systematic techniques pioneered by Frederick Reichheld at Harvard Business School for benchmarking online reputation. Case studies featured include Coca Cola, McCain, Bird's Eye frozen foods, Body Shop, Lush and Urban Decay.

We've had several projects dealing with brand protection this year and the most successful tactics at displacing negative comments in search results include:

• Implementation and/or optimization of a company or product blog(s)
• Content syndication
  
• Using multiple newswire services for press release distribution
• Search engine optimization of current site and any other web sites owned by client
• Link building for client site and any other positive web sites
  

Companies spend significant advertising dollars on building their brands, it only makes sense to address the effect search engine results have on their brand and reputation.

Tags: brand protection , SEO, search engine PR, blog marketing, RSS