How can you legitimately reduce the search engine ranking of an erroneous negative article?

When you say opposite effect, could you describe in more detail? I ask because I am very interested in this particular topic and consider this information to be extremely valuable and releveant research. The thing about SEO is that there is always an element of unknown. There is much that users, searchers, marketers do not have much control over for obvious reasons.

Behavior patterns that you are describing I am sure many would find as valuable information. If you could tell me what kind of content (if any) you created. How many different pieces of content you created, and what you did with that content exactly - I would be very grateful. Also when you say "turning around" what does that mean also. Sorry one last request, could you give me time frames?

Glad to hear it is turning around.!! Yes the truth does prevail

Thank you-

I think I know what happened after reading your question again and it is important to clarify this for anyone who reads or tries this on their own. When you create content to push other negative copy down so it is virtually non existant- that content should in no way be related to the negative content. It must be completely unrelated. Just fluff type content that talks about who the company is, what they do, and how they do it. Highlighting some of the companies achievements. If you respond to the negative claim online several things happen. You give even more fuel to negative comments since you expand on them. From a readers perspective- even if the comments were on the second page and yours were number 1 - you urge a reader to find the negative comments so they can piece the story together. My apologies for not being more clear about this, but this is why it is so important to hire a professional. Going into enough detail on a site like this is just to much information to give to every response. These responses should be used to confirm another point of view of someone you have hired to do the job.

Thanks for coming back to this Jennifer. The first thing we did was contact the author (major news agency) to provide the relevant facts. The author updated the article with valid content but didn't change the title, which meant that the article still stayed on the first page of search results - it's almost as if getting the article updated increased the search engine ranking. We were given two sets of advice (1) to do a automated whitewash campaign, which we weren't keen on and (2) create additional unrelated content. We went with the second option but this has taken around three weeks to move the negatively titled article to the bottom of the first page of search results. On reflection, we could have chosen to publish content to more prominent sites and we could have also cast a wider net for our publishing effort.