Man, if I had a dollar for every time this question was asked of me I would already be able to retire completely. There's no easy way to say this, so let's just rip the band aid off shall we?

I think we can all agree: regardless of whether the comments are justified or not, no business or brand wants to see lousy reviews about themselves online. As such, discovery of such content can induce panic, anxiety and a desperate willingness to do literally anything to get it removed as fast as possible.

First, do yourself a favor and breathe. Next, let's all take a minute of silence to recognize that this is in fact a real problem and it absolutely sucks to deal with – but you WILL have to deal with it sooner or later, and it will not be an easy task.

Okay, great. Now that you've accepted reality and stepped out of the grief stage, we can focus on tackling the problem at hand. Although getting rid of less-than-stellar content may seem complex, it's actually fairly simple in theory – but hella time consuming in practice. For all you non-SEO nerds out there, allow me to translate for you:

The only way to get rid of negative reviews about your business or brand online is to outweigh those listings with other, more trustworthy and reputable ones. How are those obtained, you ask? By creating content, and lots of it. The idea is that eventually, the negative listings will fall so far back in the search results pages that people are less likely to see (and therefore click on) them.