Search engines list my site as #1 and #2 for [company name] sucks

At work, I have to deal with a ****ty content management system a client contracted for a site we had to do design work on. The only functionality the company provides is user authentication and an archive of their articles (something I could have done myself, but they decided to select "professionals" to do it instead).

Anyway, this company always screws stuff up, and even though the project was completed 3 months ago, I still spend a good 3 to 4 hours each week dealing with their tech support over some issue (i.e. the other day, members were denied access to paid content. For a site that gets 50,000 hits a day, this is REALLY bad) and each time I have to deal with their incompetent staff (right now, the archive pages load really slow, becuas ethey just enumerated the option boxes for years from 1 to 2004, and there's 5 of these in the search area).

I wrote a rant on them the other day (witholding only my company and client's name/website) and let's say that although honest, it was very negative. The other day I discovered that searching for the term [really bad company] sucks returned my page as the 4th result. I brought this to my boss' attention because I didn't want to cause any trouble over it, and he agreed that although there probably isn't much of a legal issue over it, we still couldn't afford to handle a legal action from them. So I simply removed the blog entry.

Well, doesn't look like it helped... now google lists my site as results #1 and #2 for the term!!! I don't really think I'm ready for this kind of attention that this will bring to my site! What should I do!?

I don't think there's much you can do about it now, obviously. As long as what you said is true, I don't see how they could take any legal actions. You're entitled to express your own opinion, so long as you didn't slander them.

Do you really think people will be searching for "company sucks" a lot?

---John Holmes...