How to clean up a SERP?
-
I have a new customer and he wants me to clear up the SERP for his branded keyword, the SERP currently has his site and two other sites related to him under his result... Under that is bad reviews and old reports. My client does own the top spot (#1) for his branded name.
My client has a:
linkedin
facebook
twitter
myspace
I was thinking to push all these to the first page, this will clear up some of those bad reviews.
What are your thoughts?
Have any of you ever had this type of case?
I need to get 6 different sites to all rank for the same exact key term, however I have the top spot to link from...
-
I agree with what they've said above, but one piece that's been missed is Google+. Be sure to get a Google+ brand page set up and link it to the website and other social sites. When you do a search these days, not only do they show Google+ pages in the normal SERPs but they also show a callout on the right sometimes. Having a Google+ strategy is a necessity these days: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-every-marketer-now-needs-a-google-strategy
-
You're thinking about it the right way at least. Many clients come to me with "get rid of that bad listing right now!!!" and I have to respond with "I'm sorry but if I controlled the internet I wouldn't be working for you" and then they storm out and it's generally a bad scene.
All those things you mentioned are good tactics to push something down the SERP. Some others off the top of my head:
- Press Releases
- Guest Blog/Friend Blogs about the company
- Bizarrely, YouTube works sometimes if the account is co-branded
- Registering for services like Manta, TechVibes, citdirectory, macrae's, other industry directories
- Legitimate forum postings made in the company's name
There's others, but I think you get the idea.
-
This sounds like a case for reputation management.Where are the reviews?Yelp Google PlacesIf the bad reviews are on yelp then I would talk to your client about getting more good reviews.Have him talk to his clients and get those good Yelp reviews flowing.If they are on a site like rippoff report, then bumping that site down will help.If he has lots of places that have complaints then a hard look at WHY people are giving him bad reviews...I know of an online zine that was just a horrid spammer & guess what, those complaints stayed at the top as well as all the forum posts about his spammy ways & insulting emails ....Your client needs to know what sites covert traffic and clients.If he actually GETS clients & income from twitter then yes get that twitter acoutn to the top.If not, then having low ROI sites cluttering the top serps won't help much.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why is my website not ranking for it's brand name in SERPs but has been indexed by Google?
The website https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com has been live for a couple of months but is not being found in Google search results - even when searching for it's own brand name 'crowne plaza christchurch.' Google has indexed the site - but we are still not showing - https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fchristchurch.crowneplaza.com&rlz=1C1NHXL_enNZ735NZ735&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58j69i59l2j69i65.896j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Any ideas as to why? I think it may be because their are two versions of the site, http and https, both with their own rel=canonical tags. Could this be the cause? Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmy30 -
Questions on Google Penguin Clean-up Strategy
Hello Moz Community! I was hit with a REAL bad penalty in May 2013, and the date corresponds to Penguin #4. Never received a manual spam action, but the 50% drop in traffic was very apparent. Since then, I've had a slow reduction in traffic, to where I am today... which is almost baseline. Increases in traffic have not occurred regardless of efforts. In researching a little more, I see that my old SEO companies built my links with exact keyterm matches, many of them repeated over and over, verbatim, on different sites. I've heard two pieces of advice that I don't like 1) scrap the site, or 2) disavow all the links. I would rather see if I can get the webmasters to change the link to something generic, or my brand name, before I do either of these. To scrap my site and start new will be damn near impossible because I'm in an extremely competitive niche, and my site has age (since 2007), so rather work with what I have. A couple of questions, for folks who are in the know about this penalty, if I may: This penguin update, #4, on May 22nd, was it ONLY because of the link text? Or was it also because of the link quality? None of the updates before it harmed me, and I believe those were because of the quality? Could it be for links linking from my blog to my site? My blog (ex. www.mysite.com/blog), has close to 1,000 blog posts, and back in the days I would write these really long, keyword stuffed links leading to www.mysite.com. I've been in the process of cleaning these up, and shortening them, and changing them to more generic (click here's), but it is a LONG and painstaking process. If I get webmasters to change text to just the url or brand name, that's better than disavowing, correct? As long the linking site has a decent spam score and PA/DA on OSE? Is having SOME exact anchor text okay on these links? Is it just the abuse that's the problem? If so, how many should I leave? (like 5 max per keyword?) Or should I just change to the url, or disavow altogether, any and all links that have exact keyword matches? I've downloaded my link profile from OSE and Majestic, and will do so from Ahrefs (I believe it is)? Does Webmaster Tools have any section that can help give me insights into the issue? If so, can you point me in the right direction? Can I get partial credit, for some work done? For instance, say a major update, or crawl, happens, and I've only fixed/disavowed 25% percent of the links by then, is there a possibility that I get a small boost in traffic? Or am I in the doghouse till they are all fixed? Say I clean/disavow everything up, will my improvement be seen in the next crawl? Or the next Penguin update? As there may be a substantial difference in time there. 😎 I see AHREFS, has some information on anchor text... any rules of thumb as to percentages of use of a certain anchor text, to see if I'm abusing or not, before I start undertaking all of this? Thanks! Could the penalty have "passed" altogether, and this is just where I rank? Thanks guys, but the last thing I want to do is ditch my site... I will work hard on this, but need some guidance. Much appreciated! David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidC.0 -
What is best practice to eliminate my IP addr content from showing in SERPs?
Our eCommerce platform provider has our site load balanced in a few data centers. Our site has two of our own exclusive IP addresses associated with it (one in each data center). Problem is Google is showing our IP addresses in the SERPs with what I would assume is bad duplicate content (our own at that). I brought this to the attention of our provider and they say they must keep the IP addresses open to allow their site monitoring software to work. Their solution was to add robots.txt files for both IP addresses with site wide/root disallows. As a side note, we just added canonical tags so the pages indexed within the IP addresses ultimately show the correct URL (non IP address) via the canonical. So here are my questions. Is there a better way? If not, is there anything else we need to do get Google to drop the several hundred thousand indexed pages at the IP address level? Or do we sit back and wait now?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ovenbird0 -
How to find all of a website's SERPs?
Was wondering how easiest to find all of a website's existing SERPs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Cleaning up /index.html on home page
All, What is the best way to deal with a home page that has the /index.html at the end of it? 301 redirect to the .com home page? Just want to make sure I'm not missing something. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0 -
SERP Drop overnight for one of our domains - could it be the title changes?
Hi Scratching our heads here over SERP drop for some of our product pages, Although they are all uniquely titled with the product name, we have recently added 4 words at the end of our title, like a slogan which are repeated on every one of our product pages. However, we've also seen a drop, but not as far, on related category pages, these have unique titles. When we talk about "unique title" being important for SEO, does that mean 0 reptition between page titles? I see many companies use their site name in the title (even here see | SEOMOZ Q&A - would four words at the end of a title do this? Or am i barking up the wrong tree entirely? Ive seen so much movement over the past few weeks its hard to correlate anything we do with the result, so even after advise I think i'll wait a week
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Taking up the entire serp
Hey guys, I tried to search across the q&a for an answer but came up with nothing for this. I'm competing well for our keyword rankings with 20 keywords, 13 of which on the first page and 9 in the top 3. Which is great! But what we are interested in doing is taking over the rankings. Currently competitors reside around us in the serps taking up the remainder of traffic. We are considering creating new websites and competing on the same keywords to rank and eventually take over the google rankings for our products. So that if you were to look to buy 'purple buttons' the top 5 websites sell these but are owned by ourselves. The question is. Has anyone else done this? What are googles views? Are there any traps that we could run into? As far as I see it the only real issues we could run into are with google on a moral basis. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenBrands0 -
Microdata & Competeing against Amazon in the SERPs
Hello... I have an ecomm clients who's competing against Amazon in the SERPs. Amazon does a great job of leveraging micro-data. Here's the rub... Amazon is ranking for product level pages and my client is ranking for category level pages. How can my client leverage micro-data to 'compete'?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0