Text links can play a crucial role in brand defense for your Web site.

Have you ever had someone write a negative blog post or post something negative in a discussion forum about your company? Often times, when this happens, that blog post or comment will get indexed by the search engines and be very visible to your customer base.

So, what can you do to defend your company?

The first thing you can do is to give it a little time. Many times a search engine result like this will disappear within a couple of days. I know it can be painstaking to wait, but sometimes just sitting tight is the best remedy.

Secondly, check out the other search results that appear beneath the negative blog post or comments. If you are start developing copy and linking to these sites, there is a good chance that they will be able to climb higher than the negative search result.

Lastly, if it has reached the point where you need to get rid of that negative result, than start building links for the sites that appear directly beneath it in the search engines.

In general, as a site develops more quality and relevant backlinks, it tends to move up in the search engine rankings. As such, you can eventually get that negative listing to fall lower and lower on the page, resulting in much less eyeballs.