Google is giving one of my competitors a quasi page 1 monopoly, how can I complain?
-
Hi,
When you search for "business plan software" on google.co.uk, 7 of the 11 first results are results from 1 company selling 2 products, see below:
#1. Government site (related to "business plan" but not to "business plan software")
#2. Product 1 from Palo Alto Software (livePlan)
#3. bplan.co.uk: content site of Palo Alto Software (relevant to "business plan" but only relevant to "business plan software" because it is featuring and linking to their Product 1 and Product 2 sites)
#4. Same site as #3 but different url
#5. Palo Alto Software Product 2 (Business Plan Pro) page on Palo Alto Software .co.uk corporate site
#6. Same result as #5 but different url (the features page)
#7. Palo Alto Software Product 2 (Business Plan Pro) local site
#8, #9 and #10 are ok
#11. Same as #3 but the .com version instead of the .co.ukThis seems wrong to me as it creates an illusion of choice for the customer (especially because they use different sites) whereas in reality the results are showcasing only 2 products.
Only 1 of Palo Alto Software's competitors is present on page 1 of the search results (the rest of them are on page 2 and page 3).
Did some of you experience a similar issue in a different sector? What would be the best way to point it out to Google?
Thanks in advance
Guillaume
-
We are seeing this every day for lots of searches in the UK. I did some reading up on "domain clustering" and found that Google recently reverted its algo regarding how many results it displays for a particular search term. It used to be no more than four, then it changed to 7, which is an older practice. Compare this with competition from Amazon, Ebay, the .com and .nz results for transactional searches, and the bias towards brands and most small businesses in the UK dont stand a chance of competing in organic search anymore. I for one know of several small businesses that are down 70% because of this, dropping from position 1-3 to position 8-12. Hence the PPC conspiracy theory. "Google did it on purpose to push us all into using PPC".
-
I am not sure how much Matt Cutts will take the feedback into consideration, but he is asking for feedback on sites that you think should rank well but don't.You can find the form here:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Czwk15Yc_-zcnnlvqTuspEnz2Sn3Aw2JxhkWvoVxVS4/viewform
It might be worth filling it in. Other than that, if your competitor has a number of sites ranking it sounds like a perfect opportunity to check the sites backlinks, and see if you can get similar backlinks from some of the higher authority sites.
-
Unfortunately Google is not always fair there was a trail from Matt Cutss where you could email him as to why you should be on top of the SERP. The only thing you could try is looking into their back links to see if there is something very spammy you could report them on.
The best bet is keeping working on making your site better and wait for the algorithm change that will make your site better. Take a good look at their site and see why it it out ranking yours and try to make you site better from the research.
In short: You could report them in webmaster tools but don't expect too much, I'd focus your efforts on trying to rank your site rather than reduce your competitors rankings.
Hope this helps.
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 Google cached another site, not mine?
Hi Guys, please help me. I need your help regarding my business website i.e. https://www.kamagratablets.com/. Before 8-10 days it was ranked in top 10 from home page but I lost my position and ranking page also changed by Google. If you will check caching of this website then you will see Google cache another site - http://www.hiphoptoptower.com/ - I have checked my code and nothing found related to this website. Please check and help me on this point, how can I remove this site from caching and get my previous ranking in Google.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Devtechexpert0 -
Separating the syndicated content because of Google News
Dear MozPeople, I am just working on rebuilding a structure of the "news" website. For some reasons, we need to keep syndicated content on the site. But at the same time, we would like to apply for google news again (we have been accepted in the past but got kicked out because of the duplicate content). So I am facing the challenge of separating the Original content from Syndicated as requested by google. But I am not sure which one is better: *A) Put all syndicated content into "/syndicated/" and then Disallow /syndicated/ in robots.txt and set NOINDEX meta on every page. **But in this case, I am not sure, what will happen if we will link to these articles from the other parts of the website. We will waste our link juice, right? Also, google will not crawl these pages, so he will not know about no indexing. Is this OK for google and google news? **B) NOINDEX meta on every page. **Google will crawl these pages, but will not show them in the results. We will still loose our link juice from links pointing to these pages, right? So ... is there any difference? And we should try to put "nofollow" attribute to all the links pointing to the syndicated pages, right? Is there anything else important? This is the first time I am making this kind of "hack" so I am exactly sure what to do and how to proceed. Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lukas_TheCurious1 -
Google Manual Penalty - Dilemma?
Hi Guys, A while back, my company had a 'partial match' manual penalty from google for 'unnatural links' pointing to our site. This glorious feat was accomplished by our previous SEO agency for quite heavily spamming links (directories, all kinds of low quality sites). That being said, when the penalty hit we really didnt see any drop in traffic. In fact, it was not long after the penalty that we launched a new website and since our traffic has grown quite significantly. we've doubled our total visits from prior penalty to now. This previous SEO also did submit a couple of reconsideration requests (both done loosely as to fool Google by only removing a small amount of links, then abit more the next time when it failed - this was obviously never going to work). Since then, I myself have submitted a reconsideration request which was very thorough, disavowing 85 Domains (every single one at domain level rather than the individual URLs as I didnt want to take any chances), as well as getting a fair few links removed from when the webmaster responded. I documented this all and made multiple contacts to the webmasters so i could show this to Google. This reconsideration request was not successful - Google made some new backlinks magically appear that i had not seen previously. But really, my main point is; am I going to do more damage removing more and more links in order to remove the penalty, because as it stands we haven't actually noticed any negative effects from the penalty! Perhaps the negative effects have not been noticed due to the fact that not long after the penalty, we did get a new site which was much improved and therefore would naturally get much more traffic than the old site, but overall it has not been majorly noticed. What do you guys think - is it worth risking drop in rankings to remove the penalty so we don't face any future issues, or should I not go too heavy with the link removal in order to preserve current rankings? (im really interested to see peoples views on this, so please leave a comment if you can help!)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sandicliffe0 -
Can i 301 redirect a website that does not have manual penalty - but definetly affected by google
ok, i have a website (website A) which has been running since 2008, done very nicely in search results, until january of this year... it dropped siginificantly, losing about two thirds of visitors etc... then in may basically lost the rest... i was pulling my hair out for months trying to figure out why, i "think" it was something to do with links and anchor text, i got rid of old SEO company, got a new SEO company, they have done link analysis, trying to remove lots of links, have dissavowed about 500 domains... put in a reconsideration request... got a reply saying there is no manual penalty... so new seo company says all they can do is carry on removing links, and wait for penguin to update and hopefully that will fix it... this will take as along as it takes penguin to update again... obviously i can not wait indefinetely, so they have advised i start a new website (website B)... which is a complete duplicate of website A. Now as we do not know whats wrong with website A - (we think its links - and will get them removed) my seo company said we cant do a 301 redirect, as we will just cause what ever is wrong to pass over to website B... so we need to create a blank page for every single page at website A, saying we have moved and put a NO FOLLOW link to the new page on website B.... Personally i think the above will look terrible, and not be a very user friendly experience - but my seo company says it is the only way to do it... before i do it, i just wanted to check with some experts here, if this is right? please advise if 301 redirects are NOT correct way to do this. thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | isntworkdull
James0 -
What has been updated on part of Google Penguin 2.0?
I am looking for more details of Google Penguin 2.0 update. Is any information from SEO experts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gbavadiya1 -
Competitor frustration
I've tried to be completely "white hat" in my SEO efforts and my site ranks pretty well. However I'm being consistently beaten in the rankings by sites that pull every trick in the book and never seem to get penalised. One of my main competitors has 100s of near identical pages (just the town name different on each) and ranks close to or at the top for many searches, and has done for a couple of years now! Another uses massive keyword stuffing without any apparent adverse results. I don't want to follow their example, but my business is suffering as a result. Why can they get away with it and is there any way to "complain" to Google about it?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MagicianUK0 -
I think my site is affected by a Google glitch...or something
Although google told me No manual spam actions found i had not received an unnatural link request notice i figured it would be a good idea to clean these up so i did. So i have submitted 3 reconsideration requests from google. They all came back with the same response: No manual spam actions found. I really doubt that anyone at google really checked those out.You will notice that i don't even appear on page 1-10 at all...its clearly google filtering the site out from the results(except for my brand terms), but i have no idea what for.What do you guys think it is? If you see anythign let me know so i can have it fixed.This has been going on for 2 months now...my company has been around for a long time...i dont understand why suddenly im not showing up in searches for the keyword si used to rank for...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CMTM0 -
Competitors have local "mirror" sites
I have noticed that some of my competitors have set up "mirror" homepages set up for different counties, towns, or suburbs. In one case the mirror homepages are virtually identical escept for the title and in the other case about half of the content id duplicate and the other half is different. both of these competors have excellent rankings and traffic. I am surprised about these results, does anyone care to comment about it and is this a grey hat technique that is likely to be penalized eventually. thx Diogenes
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0