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
-
Having problem with multiple ccTLD sites, SERP showing different sites on different region
Hi everyone, We have more than 20 websites for different region and all the sites have their specific ccTLD. The thing is we are having conflict in SERP for our English sites and almost all the English sites have the same content I would say 70% of the content is duplicating. Despite having a proper hreflang, I see co.uk results in (Google US) and not only .co.uk but also other sites are showing up (xyz.in, xyz.ie, xyz.com.au)The tags I'm using are below, if the site is for the US I'm using canonical and hreflang tag :https://www.xyz.us/" />https://www.xyz.us/" hreflang="en-us" />and for the UK siteshttps://www.xyz.co.uk/" />https://www.xyz.co.uk/" hreflang="en-gb" />I know we have ccTLD so we don't have to use hreflang but since we have duplicate content so just to be safe we added hreflang and what I have heard/read that there is no harm if you have hreflang (of course If implemented properly).Am I doing something wrong here? Or is it conflicting due to canonicals for the same content on different regions and we are confusing Google so (Google showing the most authoritative and relevant results)Really need help with this.Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shahryar890 -
Video SERP Help
Hello Friends,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KINQDOM
I try to appear on search results of property related search terms with my property videos. Here is a sample property video
http://www.antalyahomes.com/videositemap.asp May you please check it and tell me what I do wrong? Thanks in advance for your time.0 -
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 -
How long does google take to show the results in SERP once the pages are indexed ?
Hi...I am a newbie & trying to optimize the website www.peprismine.com. I have 3 questions - A little background about this : Initially, close to 150 pages were indexed by google. However, we decided to remove close to 100 URLs (as they were quite similar). After the changes, we submitted the NEW sitemap (with close to 50 pages) & google has indexed those URLs in sitemap. 1. My pages were indexed by google few days back. How long does google take to display the URL in SERP once the pages get indexed ? 2. Does google give more preference to websites with more number of pages than those with lesser number of pages to display results in SERP (I have just 50 pages). Does the NUMBER of pages really matter ? 3. Does removal / change of URLs have any negative effect on ranking ? (Many of these URLs were not shown on the 1st page) An answer from SEO experts will be highly appreciated. Thnx !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PepMozBot0 -
Rel=author, google plus, picture in Article page SERP
Hello, Could someone explain the easiest way to use Google Plus and rel="author" to claim our articles written by us and get our picture beside them in the Google SERPS site: nlpca(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Good Google SERPS but poor bing and yahoo rankings.
My site has some good google SERPS but yahoo and bing don't rank it well at all. I know of course they have different algorithms to google but I would expect there to be some correlation. Why does google appear to consider my site valuable and return it for search queries and yahoo/bing don't?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Is it possible for one man to go against industry leaders in serps?
Hi, Is it possible for an individual to go against the big boys in a industry sector? Lets say flowers in the UK, all the massive flower companies go for 2 keywords: 'flowers delivered' (30,000 ems) and 'flowers by post' (30,000 ems) Would it be possible to start a new site and within 6 months (July) be up in the top 5? Scrap any exact match domains as there gone, I'm talking about creating a brand such as flowerpower.co.uk picking a term and going for it. Is this possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
How to get videos to show up on SERPs as your own
If another site hosts the video and you show it on your site in an iframe, would the video show up in SERPs on your URL? I believe it would show up on their URL. Do you need to host the video on your own server in order for it to show up on SERPs?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0