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We secured an article on national newspaper site for a client which now ranks number one for its own branded search term. Since we secured the article (over two years ago) the client has changed the direction of its business so the article is now no longer relevant and is actually causing a lot of trouble for the client. When people search for their business the article is telling readers one thing when their business actually does something else. How can we stop this article ranking so highly?

Total!

Sorry Chandubaba, I have to agree with Adam here.

1. What about adding content to your own website?

2. You haven't mentioned anything here about the value of your articles and links. I can submit 30 articles to low quality article submission sites and get nothing. But then I can spend a few hours developing a really valuable piece of content and pitching it to a quality blog and get an excellent, sustainable link.

Your strategy is too simplistic. I use this rule of thumb: the easier the strategy, the less SEO value it will deliver.

Hi Janc

It's a really frustrating process, but totally worth doing: go through every keyword in your spreadsheet, line by line, and ask yourself: "will people use this keyword if they are looking to buy document storage?" if the answer is yes, mark the keyword '1' in a new column.

Then, sort your list by the new column, so that all the keywords with '1' next to them are together- my bet is your keyword list will now be at a more manageable level (probably close to 100).

Then, Google every single one of your keywords to check if the search results are similar companies to yours. For example, if you google "drawers" and the results are all to do with women's underwear, you can cross this off your list as you will struggle to compete for rankings with those results. Or if you google "office document storage solutions" and three competitors are all ranked on Page 1, you know that this is probably a worthwhile keyword to target.

By this stage, your list will be much shorter and  much more targeted. Then, look at competition and local monthly searches - based on these, choose your top 30-40 keywords to focus on. Optimise for those high value keywords first - it's a big job. Then move on to the next tranche.

I hope this helps - I am learning all about managing capacity in SEO.

Kind regards

Heather

Hi Robert. Welcome to the wonderful world of SEO!

You should use the location based keywords that mention your town, because these include the general keywords anyway. So "neck pain Bloomington" covers both scenarios.

I have to disagree with Glenn on the update frequency. I update at least one page a day on my website. When I went on holiday for a few weeks, my colleagues took over all search marketing activity, except page updates. In the two weeks I was away, we slid down the search marketing rankings. In every other instance we have climbed the search marketing rankings.

Nofollow links have no value as far as Google is concerned, so focus on followed links. That said, I get a lot of traffic from Nofollow links on popular web pages - so if the site only offers nofollow links, but is authoritative, it's good for your site, if not your SRO strategy.

Re outbound links, make sure they open in a new window so they don't take visitors off your website. I include outbound links where they add value to the post.

I hope this helps!

Hi LoudNoise.

1. was there any site downtime during the migration?

2. Have you compared traffic sources before and after the migration to isolate the source of the problem?

H

I think you should structure your URL from the point of view of the reader rather than Google - that way you future proof yourself against any Google updates.