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Spam in search engine results for company brand name
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Hi,
I'm having a strange problem with a certain comapny.
When you Google their brand name the first 8 results or so are related - their site, Google+ page, Twitter etc. The rest of the results are completely unrelated to the site and much of it is in another language and looks really spammy.
According to the site owner until recently the first 50-60 results were related - mostly local results, press releases, and franchise companies listing his business. They don't have a great link profile but that shouldn't have them dropping out of the results, especially since they're still ranking in the top 1-8 positions.
Here's the strangest part: the company name is Libertana. All the spammy results are not so much spammy, they're related to the syllable "na". Examples:
- Ivanyukite-Na Mineral Data
- įt$koka!na's sounds on SoundCloud - Hear the world's sounds
- Bosiniya na Herizegovina - Wikipedia
What on earth is going on? Why would they rank for the last syllable of their name?
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Perhaps a competitor or hacker are trying to displace them from the search results? One of the 'spam' results has "2,427 links to this URL from the past 32 days" according to Open Site Explorer - have you checked to see if any of that anchor text is the company name? I don't have full access to Moz at the moment so can't see.
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