I have a local business complaining of foul play from a competitor business. In short, they are complaining of being "removed" from search engines. From what little I have learned about what is going on it sounds like the competitor has "better geeks" and is using search engine optimization techniques to rank higher on the results pages. There's a little more to the story, such as being "removed" from Yelp and some fictitious bad reviews, but those are in another agencies jurisdiction (this business is in a few other cities).
Some things I am trying to understand are
1. How does a business get multiple results on a search engine. It appears that the competitor has several domains, so this may explain this.
2. Most confusing is - how the physical addresses for a given result are generated?
The competitors business has two results that match the address for the complainant only one street in either direction.. does a person (the competitor in this case) have to submit a physical address for the search engines to produce or does the search engine somehow generate this?
Thanks for any help. Let me know if you need more information to help me.
I don't think is a forensics question. SEO is a very big topic, great 'fun' and lots of help elsewhere.
I understand. I was hoping someone here might have some knowledge on the topic though.. I'm sure I am not going to get an easy answer, but maybe some direction on a reliable place to get educated on it enough to answer/explain my question.
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1. How does a business get multiple results on a search engine. It appears that the competitor has several domains, so this may explain this.
It does not have to be multiple sites, but that does help. "Pages" are the target of search engines, not sites per se. So if the keyword returns multiple pages from the same site, the search engine thinks all those pages are relevant to the keyword.
The best (as in longer lasting and higher positions) SEO solution are through link-back from good neighborhoods that is keyword relevant, and authoritative sites.
For example, this site getting a link back from amazon dot com worth less than a link from fbi dot gov, despite Amazon way bigger than the FBI site. This is because Amazon is very generic, while the FBI is more targeted to the topic of this site. Again, this is just one fragment of this SEO.
2. Most confusing is - how the physical addresses for a given result are generated?
The competitors business has two results that match the address for the complainant only one street in either direction.. does a person (the competitor in this case) have to submit a physical address for the search engines to produce or does the search engine somehow generate this?
Thanks for any help. Let me know if you need more information to help me.
The business has to create something that is relevant to the keyword, then overpower the relevance of the other business - ultimately anyone can do it with proper SEO.
As you wrote, it is simply having better geeks. SEO is a very fragile business.
I do alot of SEO freelance so if you wish to PM me any questions then feel free )