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SEO question: Can you outrank negative articles about your company/client with positive content?
Posted by on January 2, 2026 at 11:48 pmworking on a tricky situation and need some real talk from people whove actually done this
client is a small saas company (~50 employees). former CTO left on bad terms last year and wrote this detailed medium post basically trashing the company culture, calling out the CEO by name, and making some pretty serious allegations about how they treat employees
post went semi-viral in their niche (got picked up by a few tech blogs) and now ranks position 2-3 for "[company name]" and position 1 for "[CEO name]"
theyve been hemorrhaging leads because investors and potential hires google them during due diligence and this is literally the first thing they see
what theyve tried so far (didnt work):
- asked medium to remove it (rejected – falls under opinion/free speech apparently)
- CEO wrote a rebuttal post (just made it worse, now both rank high)
- tried traditional link building to their homepage (homepage went from p5 to p4, negative post still at p2)
- spammed positive PR in obscure publications (ranks on page 3-4, doesnt push down the main article)
so is it actually possible to outrank established negative content through pure SEO? or is this more of an ORM problem than an SEO problem?
what ive been considering:
- content velocity approach – create 10-15 high quality pieces (thought leadership, case studies, interviews) optimized for brand name + positive modifiers. problem: would this even work against a 2 year old article with natural backlinks?
- authority building – get CEO featured on major industry podcasts, tier 1 publications, speaking gigs. build actual E-E-A-T signals. timeline probably 6+ months though
- SERP diversification – optimize for knowledge graph, video results, news results, try to dominate the SERP with different content types so the negative article gets pushed down even if not outranked
- to partner with any third party reputation management service that basically does #1 and #2 at scale. Some quoted 4-6 months and $15k which client is considering but wants to know if this is even feasible before committing
but I'm skeptical cause:
- the negative article has genuine engagement (200+ comments, shared across twitter/linkedin, cited by other articles)
- its on medium which has stupid high DA
- the article is actually well-written and ranks for long-tail variations too ("[company name] toxic culture", "[company name] employee treatment", etc)
- google seems to be prioritizing "authentic voices" lately and a disgruntled ex-employee probably fits that profile
what ive learned from other cases – talked to a few people whove dealt with similar situations. consensus seems to be:
- you cant delete it so dont waste time trying
- legal threats usually backfire (streisand effect)
- pure SEO rarely works if the negative content is legitimately popular/engaging
- best case is usually getting it to page 2-3, not completely suppressing it
- timeline is measured in months not weeks
really need some honest perspectives here. client is desperate but i dont want to overpromise if this is a situation where SEO has limited impact
has anyone successfully buried this type of content? what actually worked vs what was a waste of time and money?
appreciate any real experience, not just theory
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Usually investors/VC’s bring in specialist ORM+PR companies to manage this. Its not just about outranking in desktop/all search but news too. And that means a constant production line of content
>timeline is measured in months not weeks
You can drown a page in weeks/a few months – its news thats the hardest
>the negative article has genuine engagement (200+ comments, shared across twitter/linkedin, cited by other articles)
Google deosnt care (good news) but if staff keep Googling it, it re-enforces the CTR
>its on medium which has stupid high DA
It is but the page doesn’t share the domain name’s “DA” – you just have to have more TopialAuthority.DA for the person’s name
>what ive been considering:
Its a good list -abutally I’ll give you 7/10 on this front but you’re really 40% there.
Here’s some things to add
* Multiple domains
* Not just videos + socials – you need YouTube ACCOUNTS
* Actually if you search my handle – you;ll get an idea
* But you’re missing a PR agency effect> build actual E-E-A-T signals. timeline probably 6+ months though
There are no EEAT signals – even with 200 searches a month, 1) they’re not a Google known entity – and if they are you need schema) and 2) EEAT doesnt work that way at all
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to partner with any third party reputation management service that basically does #1 and #2 at scale. Some quoted 4-6 months and $15k^^^^ This TBH
Try u/billhartzer or BlueOceanTechnologyGroup
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Either go legal or convince him to delete the piece. There’s nothing you can do to completely remove the post, and even then, it will still show in other places, so you’ll also need to do an SEO counterattack to send those results to page 100.
It’s a very tricky situation, and sadly, that’s the way it works.
As for the ORM company: yes, they may bury the article, but again, they won’t take down all other articles and the article will still exist, even if buried. And you won’t control all keywords, just common ones. Again: very tricky.
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This is a reputation/PR problem that SEO alone isn’t going to fix.
The hard truth is that if the allegations in that Medium post have any merit, no amount of link building or positive content spam is going to make this go away long-term. Google is pretty good at surfacing stuff people actually want to read, and “former CTO burns bridges publicly” is exactly the kind of thing people searching a company name are looking for during due diligence.
A few thoughts:
1. **Stop having the CEO respond publicly.** You already learned this the hard way. Every response just adds more indexed content about the controversy and signals to Google that this is an active, relevant story.
2. **Focus on building up OTHER pages that can rank for the company/CEO name** – not just the homepage. LinkedIn profiles, industry publication interviews, podcast appearances, legitimate press coverage about product launches or funding. You want to push the negative stuff down by having multiple pages you control in the top 10, not
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