White paper - search engine positioning and its impact on brand reputation

In the course of a recent net-update we mentioned that a website we examined was outperformed on a search engine by a hate site for its own company name. We thought that we would come back to this, as it is an important point to be aware of.

Lets take a rather extreme example of this to illustrate the point. A search on Google for “Huntingdon Life Sciences” shows that the company occupies top position. However, eight of the next nine results can be described as being hate sites. Remember, because of the popularity of Google as a search tool, more people probably look at this page than Huntingdon’s home page.

Its not too hard to see what the potential problems are. Even without visiting any of the websites, you get a flavour of their contents from the results page. It could scare off potential customers, employees or even investors. That can have a direct and negative impact on brand reputation. Even in the wider picture, people previously undecided on the vivisection debate, might find themselves influenced by the volume of material and the emotive language used.

So if you find yourself in a similar situation, what can be done about it? Well, before launching a costly PR counter-offensive, or hiring a fleet of expensive lawyers, there’s always the alternative of optimising your website.

Many website owners and webmasters only look at getting the home page of a website to perform for the company name. But not every website visitor has to come through the front door. If there are a number of pages performing well for the company name, then that denies search engine real estate to other pages that might have less favourable things to say.

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