8 Out Of 10 Page One Results By A Single Company

[jwarren93]

For one of the search phrases that my site has ranked well for several years is now being dominated by a single company who has several sites. Currently, they have 8 out of 10 page one results for one search phrase by using multiple domains that offer the same service. The sites are not duplicates, but are extremely similar.

Now, if you include my other top 2 search phrases along with this one, they have 20 out of 30 page one results. These three search phrases are the top search phrases in our industry.

I've reported it to Google, and hopefully they will take action, but since they are not *exactly* duplicating these sites I have my concerns. If Google does not take action, it will only encourage others to do the same thing.

Any advice on what else I can do besides reporting it to Google? One might say, just focus on your site and work on its rankings. Well, even if we were number one, a majority of the traffic would still go to this network of sites devaluing our service to our customers.

[tedster]

Sounds like you've done what you can. Clearly it's not a good user experience, but you shouldn't drive yourself crazy over this kind of injustice. The web is a big place and stuff does happen.

Google has taken some action against this kind of SERPs domination recently, but it's not clear to me if it's manual or algorithmic. I would say aim for a #1 (with sitelinks) and possibly #2 of your own. You'll be able to keep those gains long term.

[robert76]

I can show an interesting example of such phenomena. I've been monitoring it for months on one such multi-domain site. In this case though there is virtually no difference between the sites other than the name. You can search virtually anything this site contains (and it contains hundreds of thousands of things) and you will find results that stretch many pages long, each one to a different domain of theirs.

I've been trying to figure out how they are achieving this since Panda should have considered this duplicate and put an end to it but rather it keeps on growing. In fact one striking feature is that with Panda 1.0 traffic went up at what might be considered the main site and then continued going up thereafter.

I don't know if these results have been achieved via luck, skill, or trickery but the site has been so successful since Panda that at the end of last month the operation was acquired by one of the two largest home improvement chains in the US.

I just now pulled a search phrase at random and it returns one of their sites in every one of the first 8 pages of results. Moderator, is it ok to use an example search phrase to demonstrate?

[tedster]

Sorry, no. Allowing search examples like that would turn this forum into a weapon against people's competitors, and we don't want that situation. There's little to be gained by turning the forum into a catalog of bad search results.

It's always been the case that search results for some terms are really poor. That's what we get with an automated algorithm. I know it hurts to see it; I think we've all been there.

[robert76]

No trouble, that's why I asked. It was something at random anyway, not a product I offered or sold or have any involvement with. Definitely does hurt to see; I guess one day the algorithm will catch up with it.

[edited by: tedster at 4:52 pm (utc) on Jan 28, 2012]

[Slashus]

Okay, so you're complaining that another company started other websites with different but similar content and is beating you in the serpz?

Really?

I can see it now, "Google, plz make my competitor worser because I'm not smarter enough to learn their leet marketing stratz." Business/Marketing 101 lesson (if you skipped that class): You can and should create your own competition so that whether the consumer chooses options A, B, C or D you own all of them when they go to the checkout.

Geez these people with college educations, they're cheaters!

[Yulia from DNP]

Agree on that one
If you cant beat them,join them (their technique ?)
I really cant see how one competitor with many sites is different them a lot of different competitors.
i would suggest just to try to cover as much space as you can with your sites.
Nevertheless, being unique and on top has more power then duplicates.
people want to compare prices/services etc before they make a decision, so being unique is important, but i would go with making your own competition.

[jwarren93]

So flood the serps with meaningless content and new sites to achieve all page one results? When the 8 out of 10 page one sites offer the same service, it is a disservice to the web visitor to waste their time and make them think they are getting unique offerings from each of these sites.

You may think Google is there for you, to promote your business, but indeed it is there for the person seeking information.

To put it in another perspective... There are a crap-ton of Walmarts out there, but you do not see them lined up one after another on the same street.

[superclown2]

Find out who does their SEO and hire them.

[Habtom]

It is a lot of work to get different sites to all rank in the front page. I've seen some rank for {Widget}, {Widget} forum, {Widget} articles all on different domains.

It makes sense for Google to get them to rank higher than yours, if they are well optimized.

You may need more SEO effort to outrank the websites.

[Slashus]

To put it in another perspective... There are a crap-ton of Walmarts out there, but you do not see them lined up one after another on the same street.

Yeah, they go by Walmart, Sam's Club, Marketside, etc... (All Walmart stores being fed from the same warehouse)

Good thing you didn't say like Berkshire or some other conglomerate that owns every other chain you see driving down the street. Because then you'd be REALLY wrong, just not wrong.

I suggest you get to making your own set of sites with unique content to compete. Look at it this way: Each site can/will attract a little different viewer just by it's innately different slant and search metrics.

[jwarren93]

These sites are not providing unique content, just re-arranged content offering the exact same service. They target one type of viewer and only one type.

I could come up with a dozen ways to write something to target our specific user, but it would still be saying the same thing. I could also do what they're doing by adding "big", "1" and "top" to the beginning of our domain name to create more sites so I have a place to put this re-worded content. Is this what's really being suggested here?

[Slashus]

I don't know about that man. But your initial statement was absurd - in that some company is out-marketing you with one of the most basic marketing techniques taught in any marketing 101 class for any business.

Anyway, I guess you have two choices. Do nothing or suck it up and get more of your pages/domains in the top 10. Good luck. I say go for it.

[jwarren93]

My initial statement was not absurd, I stated...

"using multiple domains that offer the same service. The sites are not duplicates, but are extremely similar."

Maybe I should have explained the similarity of these sites more clearly to begin with along with the company's use of throw away domains so you could have fully understood.

What is it that you don't know? If Google should allow sites in their serps with extremely similar content, offering a very specific service (one to be exact), using throw away domain names (domain.com, domains.com, 1domain.com, bigdomain.com, topdomain.com bigtopdomain.com), targeting one type of visitor, all by one company? And then to rank 8 of those sites on page one?

There is nothing that they offer differently from any one of their sites to the next. That's the point I'm trying to make here. How does it benefit the user who is searching for this very specific service to have all of these sites presented as options?

[stuartc1]

It seems the owner of these sites has found a perfect recipe to get that topic highly ranked - this is a great find for you to reverse engineer the recipe (but obvious a real pain in the neck that you can't compete).

I know from experience that google would have picked only one of these sites to rank, and push the others way back, if they had the same owner (same ip range, whois, google account etc). Seems either google have changed that, or this webmaster has done a lot of work hidding who actually owns the sites.

How do you know for sure that it's the same owner?

[scottsonline]

This was mostly gone for two years back again in the last week or two like they removed all the filters. Blatant when the phone numbers, chat URL, address and everything else are the same but they don't seem to care

[driller41]

"That's the point I'm trying to make here. How does it benefit the user who is searching for this very specific service to have all of these sites presented as options"

What you are been told is to think about your business first and make money - I assume you want to make money, forget about google and its user experience.

Of course you can argue otherwise till the cows come home, just more time wasted.