How to do reverse SEO

Reverse SEO is the practice of pushing down negative search results about a person, brand, or company by ranking positive content above them. The term is somewhat misleading—you're not actually removing anything from Google, you're just burying it with better-ranking pages.

The mechanics are straightforward. Start by identifying which negative results are actually hurting your client. A lot of business owners worry about minor mentions that most people won't find on page two, so focus on results ranking in positions one through five for branded searches. Audit the domain authority and backlink profile of these negative pages. Usually, they rank well because they're on established domains like news sites, review platforms, or forums—the kind of high-authority sites that are hard to outrank directly. Your job is to create new positive content that ranks higher, not to fight the negative content itself. This means understanding what search intent Google is satisfying when someone searches for your client's name, then creating content that better satisfies that intent. If someone searches "John Smith CEO," Google wants to show professional profiles, company information, and LinkedIn pages. Creating better versions of what Google already wants to rank is much easier than trying to outrank an established news article.

Build your positive content strategy around owned properties first. A strong LinkedIn profile, company website pages, and professional directory listings will rank quickly because Google trusts these domains already. Create a dedicated page on your client's website that addresses whatever the negative result is about—not in a defensive way, but as a natural part of their narrative. If a bad review is ranking, create a page that showcases positive client testimonials or case studies. Build high-quality backlinks to your positive content pieces from relevant industry sites, news coverage, or partnerships. This takes time though, and impatient clients often underestimate how long it takes to push a result down five spots.

The reality is that reverse SEO works best as a maintenance strategy. Once you've pushed the negative content down, keep feeding positive signals to your branded pages so they stay strong. For acute reputation issues on major news sites, you might also consider requesting removals if the content is factually inaccurate or outdated, though this rarely works. Your primary tool remains what it always was in SEO: creating content that's better and more useful than what's currently ranking.