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?
-
A hotel brand dominating serps?
Seems near impossible with all the clout OTA's have.
How do you guys pull it off?
-
Since you are trying to dominate the first 5 positions because you want people to buy from you I would recommend building a new site from scratch with the following:
- Different domain registrar
- Different hosting company
- Different content
- Different link profile
- Different site design
...you get where I'm going.
I can vouch that having done this for a certain client of mine it is indeed possible to dominate a keyword but you have to pose a competing company.
We did this because we had a client who owned 2 hotels with 2 different names that were right across the street from one another in London. In our case we were also able to register two Google places listings.
I was personally uncomfortable about doing this as room service was provided by the same chamber maids, the food by the same chef and the prices were identical. The only difference was in who manned the reception area and the decoration of the rooms...
If you are currently number 1 for most of your keywords but you feel that some people are buying from your competitors there must be a reason and creating a duplicate of your site won't help even if you have the first 2 pages covered. I would invest my time in finding out why. Could it be the prices, the product itself, delivery options, site structure, the images you use etc?
I would build the new site, not to trick customers into buying from me, but to learn what their preferences are and then apply them to my main site.
-
These websites have public whois information. But google is a registrar and might be able to see behind private whois.
-
Ok that is interesting!
So the next question is how are Google determining who owns which website? Are they using who is data? Or something else altogether?
-
I personally believe, from watching my own SERPs carefully over many years, that google now will throttle a second or third website from same company that competes in a single SERP.
Just as you sometimes see PAGES on one website swap positions, I have seen entire WEBSITES owned by one company swap positions in the SERPs. For example... Website A has pages ranking at #3 and #4.... Website B has pages ranking at #13 and #14. I have seen them switch to Website B at #3 and #4 and Website A at #13 and #14.
-
Thankyou for the above points.
I think it's worth pointing out that our keywords are Niche, so although there are a lot of competitors we currently are the mojor brand representing our service.
What we are looking to do here is create new websites, each branded individually offering the same service.
Yes we may be cutting down a consumers choice in reality, but is that an issue when our business core is to offer the best service possible?
I understand that morally this is a grey area. BUT. Has anyone actually attempted or done this with individual sites rather than other methods.
Thanks,
-
Agreed with everything said above.
Google are trying to make the web a better place. By occupying the top 5 SERPs your attempting to reduce the options available to consumers which ruins the customer experience and as such i think Google would take a dim view on it.
Although, my company sells on ebay and amazon, aswell as our own website. For many of our key terms we occupy 3 of the top 10 listings, one for our website, one for our ebay store/product page and again for amazon listings.
Our review centre lising is not far from top 10 when searching for a particular phrase too.
-
I think that there is a much better approach to taking up more of the search engine landscape than potentially using black hat techniques. Here is what I recommend.
- Invest in PPC
- Create a video on that product and submit to video sites such as Youtube.
- Submit that product to Google Product Search
- Create a blog post on that product that is useful to consumers
- Talk about that product on Google Plus.
What people find useful ultimately is the best remedy for strong search engine rankings.
-
I would look into the reactions of consumers who realise you own all the websites.
If it looks unnatural, you might have trust issues and effect conversion. If I for example didn't see a major brand trying to sell me a certain product in the surps, I would be wondering if theres something funny going on with them.
Might be a non-issue, but thats the only other 'trap' that comes to mind.
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
-
MOZ is showing that I have non- indexed blog tag posts are they supposed to be nonindexed. My articles are indexed just not the blog tags that take you to other similar articles do I need to fix this or is it ok?
MOZ is showing that my blog post tags are not indexed my question is should they be indexed? my articles are indexed just not the tags that take you to posts that are similar. Do I need to fix this or not? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tyler58910 -
SERP Ranking
Hi everyone, I'm struggling to figure out why our website has dramatically changed and is ranking far worse than ever. We were top for around 10 keywords, and had over 4 high traffic keywords in position 1. I think the website needs updating (as it's magento 1.7), and that the competition is increasing. Taking our eye off the ball has been a huge mistake. Could anyone advise on what the next steps would be to start increasing to a better serp rank? These two are own main ranking pages:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mg33dev
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/
https://www.mediagenic.co.uk/budget-roller-banner.html Any advice or pointers would be absolutely awesome. Thanks0 -
Ranking 2 pages on the same domain in the same SERP
I thought it was generally said that Google will favour 1 page per domain for a particular SERP, but I have seen examples where that is not the case (i.e. Same domain is ranking 2 different pages on the 1st page of the SERPs...) Are there any "tricks" to taking up 2 first page SERP positions, or am I mistaken that this doesn't always happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
Is our Third Party Subdomain hurting our SERPs?
Hello! Our Moz report under the root domain godelta.com displays 696 high priority issues that we cannot control that are all caused by a third party subdomain. promotionalproducts.godelta.com We don’t have any control of the SEO on the third party website. Our blog posts link to the third party subdomain from our blog subdomain. blog.godelta.com Is the third party subdomain affecting our SERP and should we replace the subdomain with its own domain name? Hopefully we can clear this up and end the debate with our internal team and our HubSpot account manager. David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wakadaca0 -
Control Over SERPs
I launched a content branch of over 1200 guides for my company's website one year ago. This content branch now receives 180,000 visits per month. Unfortunately, my company has needed to cut back on several of the vertical services that it offers. As a result, many of the top article search results accounting for the majority of the traffic to this branch are now obsolete. Are there any feasible ways to shift the authority of these obsolete top rated pages (located in the top 20 results) to other articles that cover services that we still do offer? For reference, please see the attached image containing an overview of the top 20x results accounting for 40% of all traffic to this content branch. Green are still valid content and but all other colors are not. Does anyone have suggestions for moving more green articles up and into the top 20x results while pushing the other ones down without loosing out on overall site traffic? Appreciate any and all feedback! Thanks!!! 1qMyYEJ.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TQContent0 -
Old URL showing up in SERPs 4 months after Re-direct
Hi guys, I did a full site redirect back in October to a new URL, SERPS eventually changed to the new URL and everything was fine. However recently i have started to see the old URL showing up? Anyone else seeing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_Harris0 -
When I try creating a sitemap, it doesnt crawl my entire site.
We just launched a new Ruby app at (used to be a wordpress blog) - http://www.thesquarefoot.com We have not had time to create an auto-generated sitemap, so I went to a few different websites with free sitemap generation tools. Most of them index up to 100 or 500 URLS. Our site has over 1,000 individual listings and 3 landing pages, so when I put our URL into a sitemap creator, it should be finding all of these pages. However, that is not happening, only 4 pages seem to be seen by the crawlers. TheSquareFoothttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/http://www.thesquarefoot.com/users/sign_inhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/searchhttp://www.thesquarefoot.com/renters/sign_upThis worries me that when Google comes to crawl our site, these are the only pages it will see as well. Our robots.txt is blank, so there should be nothing stopping the crawlers from going through the entire site. Here is an example of one of the 1,000s of pages not being crawled****http://www.thesquarefoot.com/listings/Houston/TX/77098/Central_Houston/3910_Kirby_Dr/Suite_204Any help would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheSquareFoot0 -
Was moving up in SERPS then Got Stuck on Page 2
Hi, I was continuously acquiring quality back-links and my site was moving up in Google SERPS for 3 main keywords. Within a few weeks i was on Page 2 and 3 for these three keywords, but after reaching there I got stuck on these pages and positions despite no change in link building strategy / pattern. I have even increased the number and quality of links that I acquire per day, but I am still stuck at exact same positions. The website is10 months old and related to a software niche. I update this website once a week. For one keyword I am stuck at position 1 of page two (you can well imagine the frustration..!!). My question is that what do I need to do to get out of this "SERP lock"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RightDirection0