How can you use SEO defensively? Options

[kajax101]

Most SEO articles deal in optimising your website for your concerned product/service area, the logic being that it is more effective to optimise your site for a limited group of terms.

BUT...What if there are search terms that competition are exploiting against you? How can you accomadate optimising for those terms as well as your main terms?

EXAMPLE

Main term: Jones Books (your company name)

you optimise your site for Jones Books i.e. it's on your webpage, it's in the title, it's in the description, it's all over the place, you search on google for 'jones books' and you are the number one result.


WHAT A COMPETITOR COULD DO

A competitor, 'Evil black books', realises that many people mistkenly type 'jone books' leaving out the 's'. They buy the domain 'www.jone-books.com', build a 1 page site, and optimise this site for the key term 'jone books'...when people come to the site there is a big link to their website 'www.evilblackbooks.com'.


QUESTION

What can you do to counter this? Is it wise to set up a page on your website optimised for this term? What about a complete mini website? What are the pentaly risks?

[Black_Knight]

For a big business, the law would actually be the best first recourse, because the black book company is certainly trading on your name (and fat fingers). A good SEO or Webdeveloper often warns companies to buy up common misspellings at the time they buy their domain. Defensive possession of domains.

However, defensively, you'd need a consultant. There are too many different ways that the 'black book' company could be using to get that site up there. It won't really be just a one-page site, because without inbound links, a one-page site will not rank well. So you'd need to know how they were working, in order to find a strategy to counter it.

More dangerous are reviews, which can legitimately target your company name in both titles, links, etc.

[kajax101]

What about a one-page site/or a page within your website optimised for the keyterms? This could be linked to from your own site.

Also, I didn't understand what you mean when you said:

"More dangerous are reviews, which can legitimately target your company name in both titles, links, etc."

[Black_Knight]

kajax101, one page, no matter where you host it, can't do a lot, because obvously it can only have on-page factors. There is no off-page to work on any of the off-page factors - e.g. no inbound links.

Reviews can be optimised for your trademarks and such, under fair use. They really are talking about your product. Thus they can optimise extensively both on site and through third-party links, for your trademarks and company name etc.

[kajax101]

kajax101, one page, no matter where you host it, can't do a lot, because obvously it can only have on-page factors. There is no off-page to work on any of the off-page factors - e.g. no inbound links.

Well what is you link to it from your website? Would that make sense? Do you know any counter-measure that might be effective in this case?

Thanks for your help on this issue.

[SEbasic]

>>kajax101, one page, no matter where you host it, can't do a lot, because obvously it can only have on-page factors<<

What do you mean?

A one page site can have just as many links as a site that has 100 pages.

A prime example of this might be when someone owns a whole network of sites that they aren't shy about using to spam the SE's.

I may have just completly misunderstood you, but IMHO, a one page site could perform just as well (For one term) as a 100 page site.

The main difference, is that the larger site can have more pages on it - thus targetting more phrases.

[kajax101]

<this message was posted in error, please delete>

[kajax101]

I don't really want to get into the varied SEO arguments, as I think that a mulit-page website will have an advantage over a single page website, the single (home) page of a multi-page site will be able to take advantage of all the link backs from the other site pages, and more pages will allow the multi-page site to establish itself as dealing with a specific theme. Possible making it more relevent for that topic, thereby appearing higher in the SERPs.

What I'm proposing isn't intented to be a full fleged, functional website, just a counter-measure to stop other sites trying to rip off search engine traffic by optimising for mistyped versions of my key terms.

[Black_Knight]

A one page site can have just as many links as a site that has 100 pages. 

A prime example of this might be when someone owns a whole network of sites that they aren't shy about using to spam the SE's.

So we're no longer talking about a one-page site, but about a whole network that is being channeled into a single page. Without the network, no channeling, no success.

Now, if all you had was one page on one domain, what can it do?


kajax101 I'm not sure I understand you here. Are you asking us how to optimise for a single keyword (which just happens to be a misspelling of a company name)? Your question does seem to be, how do I get high ranking for a non-competitive keyword? Is it?

If so, it's back to basics.

Or do you mean, how do I optimise for a keyword without ever actually using that keyword? If so, the answer is what we call 'cloaking'

[kajax101]

kajax101 I'm not sure I understand you here. Are you asking us how to optimise for a single keyword (which just happens to be a misspelling of a company name)? Your question does seem to be, how do I get high ranking for a non-competitive keyword? Is it?

If so, it's back to basics.

Or do you mean, how do I optimise for a keyword without ever actually using that keyword? If so, the answer is what we call 'cloaking'

Well, to an extent, both.

I'd like to optimise for a term, a misspelling, but how can I use that in my website? It seems silly to include a page with a misspelled term. My main concern is not to do anything that I would get penelised for by the search engines.

i'm not sure I understand what is implied by cloaking enough to tell you if it's something i'd like to use or not.

If I included a single page on my website that was optimised for the misspelled term, and linked to it from another page on my site (my site is well ranked for our main search term), would this page ever be reasonably ranked (for that misspelled word)?

-Thanks again for your help

p.s. can you recommend any good threads about cloaking...i'd like to know more about it.

[SEbasic]

>>p.s. can you recommend any good threads about cloaking...i'd like to know more about it.<<

You can look here: http://www.cloakingforums.com/eve/ubb.x
FYI: Cloaking is really more effective when you target a whole bunch of phrases. For the kind of thing you are talking about, Cloaking may not be the best route IMO, unless you are looking to target 100's of phrases.

>>So we're no longer talking about a one-page site, but about a whole network that is being channeled into a single page. Without the network, no channeling, no success. <<

OK, I agree with that, but the point I was trying to make, is that there is no reason for a one page site not to rank as well (for one term) as a 100 page site.

As long as the content is good and you have anough links pointing to it, I don't see why the results would be any worse than any other site.

[Black_Knight]

With a 100 page site, I can get 100 links from my own internal links structure, and then can build each page so that it is built to attract at least one quality third-party link.

With a 1 page site, I have no internal links to work with, and that one page has to have the same appeal as 100 separate articles would, which as you can see, isn't possible.

Whatever you can do with one page, you can do a hundred times over with a hundred.

[James]

The issue here is of Trademark, irregardless of whether the business is large or small. Jones Books, assuming that they had trademark for the name, would be able to prevent others from using similar names as their own particularly if they are in the same business sector. With trademark, it's necessary to apply for each business sector that you currently are in, or intend to be in. It is also bound geographically and therefore it can become very costly to trademark your business name across the World. The biggest issue would be that, in your example, the name is so common that someone might already own the trademark and therefore you could be infringing someone else's trademark.

If the shady business using Jone Books as their site name were to include content, or a likeness of logos, or that kind of thing, you'd be able to 'fight' based on copyright in which case it would be necessary to establish which content existed first.

[Black_Knight]

Which is why reviews are far more dangerous - because a review comes under fair-use of your trademark and thus can't easily be fought.