How to fight bad press

Search Engines keep an old forum in top ranks

[hpelo]

My web site has been submitted and is now in very good positions
in most of the SEs; however we had bad publicity in 2000 and
a forum has a whole page dedicated to bad press.
Why do they keep ranking so high in all search engines?
They use our name in <Title> and <h2>
the rest is forum talk.
Any idea on how to demote this old story?
Are they allowed to use my company name in their title?
Should I create an identical page with different wording?

Any idea welcome.

[BigDave]

Trying to fight old bad press can generate a lot of new bad press. Just about the worst thing you can do would be to try and fight it in the courts.

Improve your site and work on getting good press.

By the way, was the bad press even arguably true? if there is any truth to it, the best thing you can do is suck it up, admit your mistakes, and try and live it down.

[hpelo]

In answer to your question, the bad press is related to a true event
that occurred 2 years ago but has been rectified since.
I'm trying to understand the mechanics/algorithms of the SE's
to improve our image;
I have changed our keywords, developed incoming links from
reputable sites and am submitting on a regular basis.
But no matter what I do, it seems like this bad forum page
shows up in top rankings and many times per SE.
Any technical advice on how to imperove this situation.

While I agree with you that we don't need new bad press,
we do need new customers and this is a serious deterrant,

Any help appreciated.

[onlineleben]

since you probably cannot ask the webmaster of the forum to remove the thread referencing to your site, why not posting in that forum a kind of success story to make clear to everyone that the reasons for the past bad press are gone.

[skibum]

There is not probably much you can do to your site that will significantly decrease the ranking of the other site.

[hpelo]

Not very encouraging....
Since then I asked for a repot on word search;
the bad press forum sites (2) come up mostly from MSN Web search;
the SE picks up the word within the <h2>, <Title> and twice in txt.
Our site also ranks high with Web search but my question to
any SE Optimization expert is how to push these results further
down.
Should I submit more pages? Anybody knows about MSN algorithm?