When websites go feral..

As Coutts Bank found, one website, batting against your brand, can have a disproportionately negative effect on your online reputation.

You may have 10,000 happy customers but it only takes one motivated, IT literate one to turn feral and as generation Y matures, there’s only going to be more of them.

Assuming the website is legitimate and can’t be taken down through legal means – or negotiated with, there is still something you can you do.

The main issue is stopping negative sites appearing directly under your main brand site in Google search results. SEO focused content creation can push the offending site far away enough from the main search results to have little associative impact on your brand.

Adding content about your brand is a good thing to do in any case, not just building a bulwark against attacks but establishing the brand as a thought leader in their respective field and providing material for social media marketing.

In that sense, the famous phrase ‘publish and be damned’ perhaps needs reversing for the online world – ‘publish or be damned.’