Competitor Trying to damage reputation via Search Engines

[Arvind_Reloaded]

We sell a software product in one of our websites.The product is quite popular. One of competitor has joined hands with some 2 websites and is optimising for my "product name" in search name using pages. They write malicious things about the product and try to harm my reputation. If i search for "my product name" their pages comes in top 5 pages.

Has anyone else encountered this problem.

How to tackle this?

[Dan Schulz]

This is more of a business and legal issue than an SEO one. If you have reason to believe that your competitors are purposely and deliberatly trying to put you out of business by harming your name and reputation, consult with an attorney on the possibility of filing a defamation suit against them.

Also, make sure that no matter what you do, do NOT resort to the tactics they're using, do not link back to their sites (since you'll just drive PR and traffic to their sites instead), and take the moral high road. If you do feel a need to fight them in the search engines, just counter the points they make about your product with facts (not hyperbole, likes and fiction), and just stand on your own merits (while talking to an attorney).

[JakeJeck]

You can hire firms to do reputation management or do it yourself.

Go create accounts at all the social media places (youtube, myspace, facebook, twitter, wikipedia, etc). Link to those pages on your site using your software product name. That should be enough to get all those sites to fill up the top 10 rankings behind your site because those sites all have so much authority.