How to Remove Negative Information from Google

Even a single negative review can cost you profits. According to the Advanced Web Ranking Study, the first ten search engine results generate 84.8% of clicks.

If negative information about your brand is the first thing people see, your consumers simply won't contact you. They'll choose competitors with a higher rating.

Negative headlines attract 63% more attention than positive ones. According to statistics, about 80% of consumers research a company online before making a purchase. This can have a significant impact on your reputation.

A damaged reputation can also negatively affect hiring of qualified employees and partnerships with other firms. Therefore, you need to monitor any bad information and attempt to resolve it.

If you are dealing with a dissatisfied customer, an official representative of your company may contact the person to offer compensation for the inconvenience. Begin your letter with an apology and take responsibility for the situation. Do not respond rudely even to outright insults.

You can also choose an altruistic method. For example, your unsatisfied customer is the coach of an amateur sports team. Your company could offer sponsorship for competitions to compensate for damage.

Even if it is impossible to delete a negative review (there is no such function on some portals), a person will be able to edit the information or write a new good review about you.

Negative information may appear in a full-fledged article online. In some cases, it's difficult to get positive results, but it's still worth a try. Point out any untrue or misleading information with evidence of the truth. For example, you should call attention to false information or fake photos. Site administrators want good information on their media, so this can often cause moderators to delete the content.

If there is no contact information on the site, use the Whois tool (Whois.net or DomainTools) to find the site owner.

Whois information looks like this:

Asking site administrators to alter or revise content is another method for removing negative Google reviews from the search engine results page (SERP). A webmaster may not always agree to delete content fully, but you can ask to make changes to the text or remove your brand name from the title.

For example, "Children suffered food poisoning in the cafe Josephine." The publisher could replace it with something like this: "In a local cafe, visitors were poisoned by food."

Your brand name won't appear when the search robot indexes the page, and subsequently this negative information won't appear when customers search for you online.

In any case, you should provide the moderators with evidence that your brand has not committed any wrongdoing.

This method for removing negative information from Google is one of the most effective and often used. The webmaster adds the "NOINDEX" tag to the HTML header. While your brand's name still appears in the text, search engines no longer scan the information on that page. Within a few weeks, that data is deleted automatically from search results and won't appear on the SERP when a customer searches for your company.

The tag looks like this:
<meta name = "robots" content = "noindex">

There are specific cases that enable you to contact Google technical support directly to remove unwanted information about you:

• Sensitive financial information. For example, bank accounts, credit card numbers, or images of your signature.
  
  
• Sexual content. If your explicit photos or videos were published without your consent, Google may remove them from the search. Sexual content involving minors is also forbidden.
  
  
• Material protected by copyright. This falls under cases for legal removal.
  

How to remove negative information from Google search results using this method? You need to write or call technical support, describe the problem in detail, and give a link to the service or site that contains inappropriate content.

Sometimes it's just not possible to remove bad content entirely. How to remove negative reviews from Google in this case? You can still reduce the impact of negative mentions on your online reputation by lowering the rating of sites where unwanted references are published. A competent SEO specialist or search engine reputation management (SERM) agency will help you with this.


An audit of the current reputation of the company and its competitors is conducted as the first step to developing a strategy. A good understanding of search engine algorithms and the current position of the brand is necessary for finding the best ways to promote positive information about the brand. The content used can be good reviews from clients or partners on various forums, blogs, third-party review sites, or in commercial articles. Any data that contributes to a positive image can be published and promoted to restore your brand's reputation.


If you are a young company and you do not have enough reviews from satisfied customers, the agency can offer you a positive seeding service. Special profiles will be created on popular forums or review sites to publish good reviews about your brand. You still need to motivate your consumers to leave reviews about you. You can read more about how to do this here.


So how to remove negative reviews on Google places? The next step is to create high-quality content to rank high in the search engine results. Your material should show your expertise so authoritative sources can refer to it. If you publish articles on trusted, popular websites, your brand reputation will grow and negative content will gradually fall off the first page of search results.

Even one bad review can damage the positive reputation of any brand, so you can't ignore them. Otherwise you risk losing your potential customers and profits. These are the basic methods for removing negative reviews from Google. First, contact the author of a negative article or review in order to try to resolve the conflict in a way that is beneficial for both parties. Or, write to site administration if the published information is clearly fake. To do this, you need to attach evidence in the form of photos, screenshots, or correspondence with the author and so on. In some cases, moderators delete a post or hide it from search robots using special tags. In cases where the information may threaten your financial security or sexual content was exposed without your knowledge, you should directly contact Google tech support.

More often than not, negative reviews remain published. It's vital to develop a SERM strategy to "squeeze out" unwanted results from the top of search results. A reputable agency will help you with this task. They will not only conduct a reputation audit and develop a strategy, but level out the negative information with positive content. They can give recommendations on how to interact with the audience in order to grow brand advocates and increase trust in the company.