It will happen to any car dealership eventually.  Search your dealership’s name (or worse) your own name… and the search engine returns a high-ranking “complaint” result.  This happened to me this past weekend and after my lawyers were called and my blood fell from a boil – I wanted to really look at this “plague” that looms for all businesses no matter the industry and/or size.

The “complaint” is designed to resolve a dispute.  Customer complains, company reviews, and resolution options are decided.  Should the company decide to not resolve the dispute, the customer can then choose legal action to have the dispute heard in a court of law.  That is how proper business resolution has always played out.

However, the Internet has changed everything.  Complaint websites are booming and the potential damage to businesses couldn’t be greater.  These websites fail in one critical area – this type of complaint is not designed to elicit an amicable resolution, the purpose of a “complaint website” post is strictly to cause reputable harm to a business – that’s it!

From rippoffreport.com’s homepage:
“Unlike the Better Business Bureau, Ripoff Report does not hide reports of “satisfied” complaints. ALL complaints remain public and unedited in order to create a working history on the company or individual in question… Your Ripoff Report will be discovered by millions of consumers! Search engines will automatically discover most reports, meaning that within just a few days or weeks, your report may be found on search engines when consumers search, using key words relating to your Ripoff Report.”

So here’s the skinny…  anyone can post anything for free, remain anonymous, post disparaging remarks against any person or business – and search engines will promote these to the tops of the results?  What’s to keep your competitor from posting remarks?  Nothing!  According to ripoffreport.com, even should the “complainant” or a court request removal of the post – they will not remove it, EVER!  How far can this go?  Well… until a major class action lawsuit brings these sites down, here are a few things you can do today.

• DO NOT RESPOND:  I know this goes against everything you want to do, however, responding and/or creating an account with these online complaint websites will only increase the SEO results.  Use this as a last resort if you are failing in good SERM.
• Subdomains, Company Blogs and Social Media: All will help with boosting ranks for your company.  These should be taken advantage of regardless!
• Issue Online Press Releases: Always provides high-ranking results and could overtime outweigh the complaint post.
• Video & Youtube: Create and post video content, keyword and tag the content correctly and this can almost immediately provide good results.

Yes, eCarList’s Search and Media department can assist with these efforts, however, it is a shame that anyone needs to!