How to make a bad posting drop down the search engines
-
we have had a competitor who has been stealing a lot of content from us and now they have used seo tactics to write a bad article about one of our sites that they have been taking content from, and what we would like to do is to use seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings.
We are consulting a solicitor to take action against them as we are fed up of the content being stolen and the other techniques they are using, can anyone give me ideas on the best way to drop this post down the rankings.
I was thinking about articles and press releases and blog posts to get higher up in the rankings and do a lot of these to drop their article down the rankings.
Our solicitor has already taken action against them in the past and that cost us a fortune and it looks like we are going to have to spend a fortune again, so any help on using seo techniques to drop their article down the rankings would be great.
-
Thanks for this. we did fill out a form with google but heard nothing back. at one time we had 30 sites with the same content as ours, when we contacted one of these sites and threatened them with legal action, they were very worried and a solicitor contacted us and told us that they were given the content by a third party.
I cannot go to much into this for obvious reasons but the company in question is a franchise company who feel scared about the service so they use underhand tactics.
What we need to do is to increase the brand exposure on google so the brand is always displaying in the top of google and people do not see these silly posts or bad articles.
-
thanks for this, i have used authorship before, but did not think about using it on that site, so i will start using that and hopefully it could help solve some of the problem
-
thanks for that, i will try that
-
That's definitely frustrating. I've been in the same boat a number of times and had decent success with a few tactics. Before you start looking at Negative SEO techniques or responding with underhanded tactics, first look at your brand.
Do you feel your brand is stronger and more solid than the copying brand?
Do you have something that's unique that they are unable to copy?If the answer is yes to both of those questions, then first focus on improving your service and look to make your brand stand out a bit more from the copy. As your brand grows stronger, their brand will get pushed back naturally. Start pushing on social media and engaging your followers to post, comment, and share your posts. This engagement will boost your SEO and the positive comments from your audience will start to show that you offer a better product.
That's the long term solution. In the short term, look and see what they're copying. If they're copying your posts word for word, then you can report that to Google. Google has a Report Copyright page for this:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1&
Google gets to these in time and will eventually drop their pages. You can also DMCA their hosting company if they're clearly copying your articles.
To combat any false negative articles they're writing about you, I would start leveraging social media. If you can get your clientele to start engaging your page, post good comments, and like posts, users who search for your brand will see that you offer a legitimate service. Follow up by writing press releases that link to your social media pages, articles, guest posts, and get the word out that you have fans who've left great feedback.
If you can successfully show that you're better without getting your hands dirty, your brand will be much stronger than the copy. They will eventually fall behind and be unable to keep up. The down side is it takes a bit more effort. However, I've taken the low road before and the problem is you end up just bickering at the same level. Neither company moves ahead because all they do is fight rather than improve their products.
-
There has to be a way to integrate authorship and having content on your site first that would identify their content as "stolen". http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html
-
Go for exact match domains, web 2.0 blogs and profiles, and social profiles. Make them legitimate and link to them (or interlink them)
Some should get traction and push the article down. It sucks, but people like that exist in this world, but karma is a b*tch and they will pay for it
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
-
Paid Guest Post Links - Value?
Hey guys, Just wanted to put the question out there about guest blogging opportunities that are paid for. It's not something we ever go for but a client has the resources to get a few quality paid backlinks. What are people's general thoughts on guest blogging - for a nominal fee - to do so? Pros and cons of the whole process? Cheers!
Content Development | | wearehappymedia0 -
How to promote press releases and guest posts
Hi, i would like to know what is the best way to promote press releases and guest posts. We do a lot of guest articles where we write for other sites and we also do a lot of free press releases, but i would like the hard work to pay off and would like to know what are the best methods to promote these press releases and guests posts. what I would like to do is to have our brand name come up a lot in the search engines. any other methods to do this would also be a great help
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Why my competitors posts rank well if those posts have lower SEOMoz?
Hello SEOMoz forum! I have a smart phone related blog, but it's not publish new related posts. I saw that most of my competitors rank well than me, even if they don't have a higher rank on SEOMoz (PA and DA). Most of their post's SEOMoz PA rank is lower than (1-5), but similar post on my blog have higher PA rank (10-15. Thanks!
Content Development | | Godad0 -
How to make new content Indexed faster by google
I would like to know what can I do. Normally it takes google around 3 days to index my content. I got a site map, swiched the crawling rate to the fastest in my webmaster tools. I also tried crawling my homepage as google bot and sending it to the index with all linked pages but even if I do so my content takes around 3 days if not more to get indexed. I publish around 20 posts a week. My SEOmoz page authority is 48. Some sites of my competition seem to be getting their content indexed in the same day. What else can be done?
Content Development | | sebastiankoch0 -
Content Duplication for Job Posting
Hello! I am responsible for SEO of a job portal of a recruitment agency. We get 30-40 jobs every month which we post on a) our job portal b) other job portals (like monster, career builder, Naukri , etc). How do avoid content duplication? We can only post the same job descriptions everywhere. We always post the job on our site first and then the other job portals**. How to ensure that Google knows our portal is the original job posters and not other job portals.** Thank you.
Content Development | | peoplesutra0 -
Short blog post or Long Blog post, Which works better?
I was thinking, that SEOmoz or other technical SEO blog writes long blog post which cracks my interest when i start reading few lines of the blog post. My mind speak, Wooo! so boring.In SEO what will be best post long or Short? Thanks
Content Development | | tapankumar0 -
Archiving old blog posts - yea or nay?
I'm building up my personal website. When I moved from my old domain to my current one a few years ago, I had moved a folder with all my old blog posts (from an old blogger.com account) to an archives called /blog/. It's bad enough the entries just text and nearly all the images aren't there but because of the way I moved over the posts, I have 200+ duplicate page titles with no meta descriptions. Is it worth saving these posts ? (putting them into an archives.mysite.com sub-domain?) I already have the folder disallowed in my robotos.txt file and there's nothing really incredible content-wise in the archives, though they are some of the oldest pages on my current (3 years old) domain. There's no real SEO thought in them as this was just a fun personal blog at the time. Thoughts?
Content Development | | JamesDziezynski0 -
I have a page where you can download a PDF of the material - should I exclude the PDF from the search engines?
In my niche, there is a controversial research article that is very popular. I am writing a rebuttal to this article and giving another point of view. My article has the potential to be really good link bait for my site. The original article is often printed out to be shown to professionals in my niche. My hope is that people will do the same with mine. So, I plan to have a PDF version of my article available on my page. The article that is visible on my site (i.e. non PDF) will be a graphic rich article that is easy for the reader to go through. I plan to have the PDF have all of the same text, but it won't have as many graphics - it will look more like a scientific research article. So, should I exclude the pdf from search engines so that it isn't duplicate content? Or does that even matter seeing as it is a duplicate of my own content? I want people to link to the main article, not the pdf. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!
Content Development | | MarieHaynes1