As the growth of media channels proliferates, the reputation of governments, businesses and brands can quickly be affected by negative coverage in the press and online media.

But the links from authoritative sites generated by such stories create search engine optimisation opportunities.

As we all know, links play a very important role in determining positions in the search engine results and the more inbound links from authorative sites, the higher the rankings - so any serious SEO campaign will have a significant effort in link building.

The recent Mattel story regarding the retailing of dangerous toys from China created a huge amount of negative coverage for Mattel, but many of the links came from authoritative news sites from around the world. But Mattel have used e-PR and SEO very effectively - consumers are blaming China, not Mattel. Indeed, the sentiment towards Mattel management is becoming positive, due to the way the crisis was handled.

The Google relevancy algorithm assumes that an authoritative link makes a company/business "trustworthy" - Google cannot determine the difference between positive or negative sentiment.  However, negative stories are damaging if they appear in keyword search results.

But savvy marketeers can use the elevated negative ranking to great effect - by using a press page and RSS to push out "positive" sentiment and utilising blogs, sub-domains and alternate corporate sites - the negative enhanced ranking can be topped up by "positive" stories that drown out the negative items, and as users tend to only look at the first page of search results, "negative" sentiment can be quickly buried.

So, in the future governments, businesses and individuals may need to consider using PR and SEO as an integrated strategy - SEO can also be used as a radar determining via keyword research what negative phrases could be used against you.

So what does all this mean?

Authoritative news sites are popular and any news story negative or positive will bring a spike in web traffic.  News stories spread. Other media comment on the story, and blogging creates instant reaction - these together provide links. The resulting links influence Google results and will send a story up the search engine rankings.

So when a negative story breaks about your company, do the SEO work on your website to make sure that your "positive" story appears in search engine results. Monitor the appearance of negative stories in search engines results, particularly for your main keywords where their appearance in the results can do you most damage.

Then get your PR team to brief journalists, issue statements, use RSS and blogs ensuring the "positive" keywords are reiterated as keywords that will help the crawlers index the stories so they are found on Google – as a result the "negative" gets buried, the "positive" sits on top of the enhanced linking - more people will read the story and more journalists/bloggers will pick up on the "positive" story.

Google will not change its algorithm to differentiate between good or bad.

As the Chinese say, "Turn poison into medicine"