Renaming of Link within Site Links - Brand Issues
-
Hi,
We welcome your thoughts on the current problem we are experiencing:
When searching for our client's brand name, their previous sponsors name is shown within the Site Links to a very important page. We are keen to change this reference within the Site Link but keep the link itself.
We have untaken the following without any change to the words used within this particular Site Link:
1) Removal of previous-sponsors name sitewide:
- Title tags
- Alt attribute
- Anchors
- Page names
- Image names
2) Removal of sponsors name from 200+ sister sites:
- Title tags
- Alt attribute
- Anchors
- Page names
- Image names
3) Modification of [previous-sponsor + client] within Wikipedia:
There were 250+ mentions of the sponsor + client within Wikipedia. References have either been deleted or changed to past tense. (Google has been extremely slow at indexing these changes.)4) Removal of off-site mentions:
After using Advanced Filters within OSE, we extracted all links that included the previous-sponsors name. We filtered these by DA and approached these sites and requested they update their links/on-site content to include the up-to-date name. This included large news organisations and reference sources.We also used Google operators (inurl, inanchor, intitle) to search for references mentions of [previous-sponsor + client]. We used Buzzstream to collate this data and contacted hundreds of sites sorted by DA.
5) We have twice requested demotion of the Site Link via GWT without success. Google clearly see's the Site Link as too important to remove it.
The following is useful background information:
The [client + previous-sponsor] worked together for 5+ years. Our client is known by it's own brand, but it was also called in certain arenas as [client + previous-sponsor].
Fresh mentions of [client + previous-sponsor] are frequent. Examples of this are from collectors merchandise and videos that are posted frequently.The page being shown within the Site Links is essential. It cannot be moved. With a PA of mid-70's.
We have changed the Title of the page multiple times, without any change to the Site Link.Thanks
Phil -
Thanks David and Jarno,
I thought the following may be useful to you. After extensive testing, we followed this process to remove the Sitelink:
We added <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">only to the page shown within the Sitelinks. Within our tests we found removing the page within GWT only elongated the removal process, therefore we refrained from doing this. Within GWT we did a Fetch and Render to inform Google of the change.</meta name="robots">
Within less than 24 hours the Sitelink was removed from the SERPs and organic sessions have not been effected whatsoever.
Feel free to ask further questions if you'd like further information.
Thanks,
Phil -
I agree with David,
I would also use a 301 redirect to a new page. You'll catch all the traffic going to the old page that way and also if Google visits it will follow that path. You could then even notice that Google changed the site link for you. It has happened on several occasions.
Regards
Jarno -
Have all the pages on all the sites you control and have revised been resubmitted? If you leave it to Google to do this on their own, it will take a very long time, most likely years before they are all gone. Even tho its a very simple tool, try using the "fetch as Google" tool in Webmaster tools. This can be done on both an individual URL basis, or you can resubmit the entire page and all its connected links. Once you have submitted all the offending URL's that contain the revised information, refresh the sitemap, and resubmit the entire site(s).
For the Wiki pages that you dont own, it will take a long time for the indexed result to change, but as long as the information on the page that it links to doesnt contain the information you dont want, you are fine. Since Wiki is so large, it may take some time for them to revise that indexed data. On the other hand, since Wiki is so big and is most likely crawled daily by Google, you might see chnages quickly. How long has it been since you modified the info?
For the on site issues, if you are seeing a very slow reindex of the modified pages, you could also create entirely new pages, and have the old page 301 redirect to the new one that does not contain the sponser.
One more thing you could try is a press release stating that the alliance no longer exists. Word it in a positive light.
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
-
Does a site with only one blog post a month rank alright?
I manage multiple websites and want to start new ones but want to know if one blog post a month is acceptable for SEO since I'm worried about rank.
Branding | | hssm20191 -
Help! Odd SERP results on two branded terms.
We have had the ODDEST thing happen to our Branded search. Last week we started seeing our Women’s subdomain (women.duluthtrading.com) outranking our main Duluth Trading domain (duluthtrading.com) on searches for “duluth trading co” and “duluth trading company”. Sample of odd results page: http://screencast.com/t/cKgkaYc1 As you can see- our Women's sub domain is ranking #1 then our main domain, THEN what used to be our organic site links are now listing 3-6. If you search for "duluth trading" though, you will get the typically results page: http://screencast.com/t/qGLDWiM0f We have been trying to figure out how or why this has happened. Our website went out for 30 minutes on January 4th. We thought maybe that is what happened but it has now been 7 days. Any help or suggestions would be great!
Branding | | sderuyter0 -
Does anyone has experience with Q&A Sites in terms of SEO value?
I would like to increase mentions to my site and brand. I thought the Q&A sites might be useful here (like Yahoo Answers). Can anyone give me some tips where to go and what to do? I would be very happy about that 🙂
Branding | | MichaelJanik0 -
How to market a brand when the brand name is constantly changing?
I work in an industry where companies are often being bought up by other larger companies. When this happens, there is often a change in the company name to incorporate the parent company name as well. My company is a distributor of these products and I'm wondering if there are best practices for marketing both the original brand name and the new brand name for the same product? We're trying to avoid any duplicate product detail pages, so dynamically generating the same page for two different names is not ideal. Anyone have any tips? Thanks!
Branding | | GalcoIndustrial0 -
Best practice for links from client sites to your site
As a webdesigner, I tend to place a link to my website in the footer of sites I build.
Branding | | Crocodesign
I consider this a form of brand awareness and reputation building, with nice SEO benefits. What is the SEO best practice in this case ? Link to a page in your portfolio describing your work on the site ? Sending all the links to the homepage ? What about the link text ?0 -
Issue with the company's brand name in SERPs
Any suggestions on how to solve this without the need to be ranked for something not related?
Branding | | GardenPet0 -
Commentluv enabled blogs for inbound links?
Question 1: What is the general consensus on gaining links through blog comments on blogs with CommentLuv enabled? Backstory: I was studying our competitor's links and tripped upon something I haven't seen before. There were a number of blog comments created in 2011 by an individual who was probably an SEO hired at least partially for the purpose of making blog comments to gain inbound links for the competitor. I haven't dug deeply enough to find if there are any more recent than 2011. The interesting part was the name/link of the company for this individual which was not the company's actual name but a URL crafted from a main keyword. It obviously has a redirect to the actual competitor's website which is where the link took me AND a link to this individual's "most recent blog post". This blog post on the company site was written by someone else entirely. Question 2: Clearly some manipulation to build links- would these links be considered unnatural? Question 3: Would it be smart for me to find blogs with CommentLuv to gain links to my blog?
Branding | | gfiedel0 -
There was a really awesome Brand Video at Mozcon last year
It was a female brand i believe. Does anyone remember which it was or have a link? Gracias!
Branding | | VistageSEO1