Outdated Google listing of COMPETITORS(!) site!

[pmkpmk]

Hi,

a few months ago, my company and one competitor sold the same brand of widgets. Then he switched brands.

Obviously, his site gets not updated very frequently by Google. Where our site shows "last updatet Sep 7", his shows no date at all. As a consequence, if you search for "our" widgets, his page still shows up in Google. If you click through, the page shows his new brand of widgets. If you go to the cached results, the old widget show up.

Of course if someone searches for "our" widget brand, I don't want his page to show up. So my question is if there is a way to have his pages updated by Google? Would it be legal, if I would submit his URL to Google? The form always speaks of "your URL"?

And if I would do so, could it be that I open up a can of worms? His presence in Google is rather weak. He has a PR of 3 (we go by 5). We have 62 backlinks in Google, he has 2. He has 110 elements indexed (searched via "company site:www.company.com"), we have 550. I don't want to see his results and his presence in Google improving only because I tried to get ONE page updated.

Any advice?

[jbinbpt]

I don’t believe that you would be opening a can of worms. The Add URL page only asks for the URL and optional comments. In Google’s documentation, the say that they don’t penalize for multiple submissions, so you wouldn’t be perceived as trying to gray bar them.

The Google database should be as up to date as possible, so you would be doing a community service.

However, I would check their source code before doing so to make sure that what you know what YOU will now be telling Google to look at.

[mayday9]

I don't think you'll get google to update because you submit his URL. Google obviously knows his site and has it's own shedule. You can't change it by submitting url. You could send googlebot to update his site by linking few good links to him, but I'm sure you don't want to do that cause it would improove his possition.

[mayday9]

oh by the way.. maybe try submitting his url to a lot of guestbooks with PR. The links seem to be neutral (won't change his possition) but just might do the trick and send googlebot his way. As far as ethics go.. you be the judge:)

[elklabone]

OR... should he consider posting a link to this competitor for a few days... then removing the link?

Just keep it up long enough to get the G-bot go go and take a fresh look. Maybe even use anchor text like "world's worst widgets" :-)

[pmkpmk]

Hi Elklabone,

actually I thought about this also. PLacing the link would not be a problem - and since we are very frequently revisited by Googlebot it should only be a matter of a couple of days.

But NAMING the link would be a problem:

a) "World's worst widgets" would be illegal in my country, plus it might make a few of my visitors go have a look
b) Making the link white-on-white would be penalized by Google
c) Naming the link "Btw, here's our competitor" would do the trick, but obviously would be arther silly thing to do when it comes to human visitor psychology
d) The only possible way would be a feature compariosn of widgets were (hopefully :-) our widgets are superior, with a link to his site as distributor of the "other" widgets. But this is quite a lot of work for me to do because in my country, feature comparisons of competitive products are required by law to be complete and truthful. Attornies are beattling (and making good money btw.) over what "complete" means, but the bottom line is that you can't pick only a handful of features or only the ones which are good for yourself...

[percentages]

>c) Naming the link "Btw, here's our competitor" would do the trick, but obviously would be arther silly thing to do when it comes to human visitor psychology

Don't under estimate this one. I use it all the time. It makes a statement....."Here are the competitors, we are so confident that you will choose us over them we decided to make your search easy by highlighting the competition".

That may not work for every psychology in the world....but it is a red rag to a bull in the USA....guaranteed to get you the sale!

[pmkpmk]

Amazing. I just did a check at Google searching for "our competitors" and got - as you said - quite a lot of links back. I'm not too sure however if it works in my home country, but I might try it on one of our international sites.