Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How to clean up a SERP?
-
I have a new customer and he wants me to clear up the SERP for his branded keyword, the SERP currently has his site and two other sites related to him under his result... Under that is bad reviews and old reports. My client does own the top spot (#1) for his branded name.
My client has a:
linkedin
facebook
twitter
myspace
I was thinking to push all these to the first page, this will clear up some of those bad reviews.
What are your thoughts?
Have any of you ever had this type of case?
I need to get 6 different sites to all rank for the same exact key term, however I have the top spot to link from...
-
I agree with what they've said above, but one piece that's been missed is Google+. Be sure to get a Google+ brand page set up and link it to the website and other social sites. When you do a search these days, not only do they show Google+ pages in the normal SERPs but they also show a callout on the right sometimes. Having a Google+ strategy is a necessity these days: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-every-marketer-now-needs-a-google-strategy
-
You're thinking about it the right way at least. Many clients come to me with "get rid of that bad listing right now!!!" and I have to respond with "I'm sorry but if I controlled the internet I wouldn't be working for you" and then they storm out and it's generally a bad scene.
All those things you mentioned are good tactics to push something down the SERP. Some others off the top of my head:
- Press Releases
- Guest Blog/Friend Blogs about the company
- Bizarrely, YouTube works sometimes if the account is co-branded
- Registering for services like Manta, TechVibes, citdirectory, macrae's, other industry directories
- Legitimate forum postings made in the company's name
There's others, but I think you get the idea.
-
This sounds like a case for reputation management.Where are the reviews?Yelp Google PlacesIf the bad reviews are on yelp then I would talk to your client about getting more good reviews.Have him talk to his clients and get those good Yelp reviews flowing.If they are on a site like rippoff report, then bumping that site down will help.If he has lots of places that have complaints then a hard look at WHY people are giving him bad reviews...I know of an online zine that was just a horrid spammer & guess what, those complaints stayed at the top as well as all the forum posts about his spammy ways & insulting emails ....Your client needs to know what sites covert traffic and clients.If he actually GETS clients & income from twitter then yes get that twitter acoutn to the top.If not, then having low ROI sites cluttering the top serps won't help much.
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
-
Meta-description issue in SERPs for different countries
I'm working with a US client on the SEO for their large ecommerce website, I'm working on it from the UK. We've now optimised several of the pages including updating the meta-descriptions etc. The problem is when I search on the keyword iin the UK I see the new updated version of the meta-description in SERPs results. BUT when my client searches on the same keyword in the US they're see the old version of the meta-description. Does any one have any idea why this is happening and how we can resolve it? Thanks Tanya
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TanyaKorteling0 -
Old URL that has been 301'd for months appearing in SERPs
We created a more keyword friendly url with dashes instead of underscores in December. That new URL is in Google's Index and has a few links to it naturally. The previous version of the URL (with underscores) continues to rear it's ugly head in the SERPs, though when you click on it you are 301'd to the new url. The 301 is implemented correctly and checked out on sites such as http://www.redirect-checker.org/index.php. Has anyone else experienced such a thing? I understand that Google can use it's discretion on pages, title tags, canonicals, etc.... But I've never witnessed them continue to show an old url that has been 301'd to a new for months after discovery or randomly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoaustin0 -
How to get sitelinks in organic SERPs?
When searching for "Madrid hotels" in google I see that the top organic search results have one row of sitelinks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
What can I do that also my site shows sitelinks if I am among the top organic search results?
Anything onpage that I can do to increase probability that google will show sitelinks? Strangely the text which shows as sitelink for SERPs from booking.com and tripadvisor does actually for most of the sitelinks not appear on the landing page (I also checked the source code).0 -
Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP
Good morning, This is my first post. I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com). On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday. If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab0 -
Is it common for a site to disappear and reappear in the SERPS?
I have a site that's 2 years old and it completely disappeared from the search results. It wasn't a manual action because I never got a notice in webmaster tools. Could the site reappear? A lot of people on Odesk say the site will reappear after a few days.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Kiwi_Man0 -
Is it normal to initially rank low in the SERPs, then over time gain rank?
We just released a very targeted page for a specific item about 18 hours ago. For the main keyword as well as multiple variations, we currently are ranking around # 40 to # 50 depending on what the exact query is. Is it normal to initially rank lower in the SERPs and then as the page ages, gain? Thank you for your insights!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DJ1231 -
Homepage shuffling in the SERP results continously - any thoughts?
We've had some shuffling for a keyword in the SERP results over last few days! Anyone else seeing their rankings bounce all over? It's only affecting one keyword that was previously a stable performer - this has occurred for the last few weeks (with no major changes to the page). Would be keen to hear your thoughts!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creode1 -
Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27 There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.0