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Reverse SEO

Reverse SEO is the practice of taking actions for decreasing the rank of a page or website in Google and other search engine pages. Reverse Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique used in online reputation management to suppress negative results on Google Search and other search engines.

Reverse SEO involves using regular Search Engine Optimization techniques on web pages ranking (directly) underneath a negative search result. Doing normal, white-hat SEO on for web pages appearing under a negative result will improve the search rankings of those web pages, causing them to move above the negative result and thereby displacing the negative item from the first page and suppressing it far back on SERPs so that (virtually) nobody searching the name of your business will see it.

Reverse SEO may be used for penalyzing competition websites. It is then called negative SEO and the practice presents legal risks. Reverse SEO may be a more legitimate practise when the purpose is to downrank a page or website which hurt brand or individual reputation. In this case, the technique used is often to try to place new webpages above the targeted page in SERPs and where possible to push down the “bad” page onto the second result page. It may also be tempting to use negative SEO for this situation.