Ever heard of reverse search engine optimization? It’s the unranking of keywords which are working well for your site. Sounds like an odd concept doesn’t it? Who on earth would want to decrease their ranking in the search engines?

Well one user of the Google Webmaster Help forum wants to do just that! He is ranking too well for his keyword (advertising presentation) and wants to rank lower because he feels his page which ranks well is not what people are really looking for.

So the user asked Google for some help and this is the response from Googler JohnMu:

If you rank for a phrase that you don’t want to rank for, there’s not much you can do other than make sure that your content does not include this phrase. Adjusting the description meta-tag and the title element to give more information about what you are really writing about can be helpful as well, although this may not affect your ranking for that phrase. Adding a “not” qualifier won’t really help to change the ranking, but it might help users who are looking for something particular.

One trick you could try is to replace individual letters with alternate glyphs that look very similar. For instance, you could replace a lower case “L” with the number “1″ (or use cyrillic characters that look very similar, eg “e”/”е”, “r”/”г”, “i”/”і”, etc.). While this would make it harder for us to understand your content (say if someone wanted to use Google Translate to read it in their own language), it would likely also prevent your content from ranking for those words.

So basically you need to undo all your good optimization work. Feel free to check out the rest of the thread in the forum here – there are some further techniques from fellow users.

Has anyone ever had to do this before with their website? I would be interested to hear your experiences in the comment section below.