Why am I ranking for this

[Grumpy_Carl]

In need of some second opinions here. I have a domain softboxsystems.co.uk which ranks for the keyword sofrigam. It is not meant to!

Have posted previously on this but to cut long story short, the clients .com started to rank for this term and then they lost the contract to supply the services so got a legal request to stop ranking for it (it had been seoed so was ranking 100% on off page issues).

The client is a UK company so they decided that they would block the .com from google and use the co.uk domain for a period of time instead while they worked on deranking the domain.

The .com domain was therefore blocked from the index, the .co.uk homepage would not rank for anything then it turned out that they had placed a canonical tag link from the .co.uk to the blocked .com!!! On my suggestion this was removed and the homepage of the .co.uk appeared in google in a matter of a couple of days (other pages on the site were indexed but not the home).

Now, somehow the co.uk domain homepage is ranking for the banned term. I have checked open link and there are not any links pointing to the domain with the anchor of sofigram, nor is the term mentioned onsite.

I now have the client panicking on the phone to get the page out of google again asap before the competitors legal people get wind of it. I am still trying to deindex the .co.uk homepage in the short term. I have readded the canonical back to the .com as that worked at not getting that page indexed previously.

The main issue I have is how on earth I am ranking for this term in the first place and  more importantly how do I stop from ranking for this term!

The only terms I can find as anchor text in the moz tools are the keywords I have been seoing for

help hehe

thanks

[Dr-Pete]

Did you 301-redirect or canonical from the old site that was optimized previously for this term? You could be seeing an indirect impact of back-links to that old site (which wouldn't show as links to the current site, depending on how you redirected them).

[SEOclient12]

It seems bizarre that now the website is no longer optimised for the term and back-links have been removed (I just double checked on OSE) that there would be any legal issues (I know that you're currently mid discussion) that you appear for the term as you are actually doing nothing wrong.

[Grumpy_Carl]

HI

Thanks for the reply.

The is it legal is an argument going on between their lawyers and the trade mark owners at the moment so not sure about it. Normally, no problems in ranking for a product trademark if it's on your page etc however in this site it was specifically seoed for the traded marked term so given they have links with the trademark term in and no right to use the trademark now this is the problem.

Ironically this keyword is proving harder to get off the first page than it was to get on the first page. Everything has been tried (bar removing the whole domain from google). Have no index tags on the default.asp yet still have an index page listed for some reason, have a canonical tag pointing to another page to try and get the homepage off but still it remains.

Getting to the stage now where i feel like buying some links to the page and emailing google with receipts saying 'look im bad' and seeing if they actually do anything!

The problem with this .co.uk is that all the trademark stuff was done on the .com and when the legal issue started we decided to remove the .com and use just the .co.uk they owned (it's a uk company anyway so no problems there) however we are now also ranking for the term with the co.uk despite having zero backlinks with the anchor text or any mention of the term on our site.

I think it's due to their developer getting confused and putting a canonical tag on the .com which they wanted to stop using, pointing to the UK domain which they want to use. I have a nasty feeling that when he did that it has carried over the link juice which really doesn't help

[SEOclient12]

Is it illegal to rank for certain keywords?

I can see how it would be against contracts to bid on certain terms in PPC, but as long as you are not offering the services on the website I'm a bit confused to how it would cause any issues?

Maybe try and get Google to penalise you for the term? I'm not sure how this would effect you rankings for other keywords though. If it doesn't then why not implement everything you're not meant to so G sends you down the rankings?

[Grumpy_Carl]

as a footnote, they stopped seoing for the banned term at least 6 months back so even taking into account delays in the moz link reporting it should have picked up the links. I can find the links for the keyword with the .com but none for the uk