Taking up the entire serp

[AdenBrands]

Hey guys,

I tried to search across the q&a for an answer but came up with nothing for this.

I'm competing well for our keyword rankings with 20 keywords, 13 of which on the first page and 9 in the top 3. Which is great!

But what we are interested in doing is taking over the rankings. Currently competitors reside around us in the serps taking up the remainder of traffic.

We are considering creating new websites and competing on the same keywords to rank and eventually take over the google rankings for our products. So that if you were to look to buy 'purple buttons' the top 5 websites sell these but are owned by ourselves.

The question is. Has anyone else done this? What are googles views? Are there any traps that we could run into?

As far as I see it the only real issues we could run into are with google on a moral basis.

Thoughts?

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

I would look into the reactions of consumers who realise you own all the websites.

If it looks unnatural, you might have trust issues and effect conversion. If I for example didn't see a major brand trying to sell me a certain product in the surps, I would be wondering if theres something funny going on with them.

Might be a non-issue, but thats the only other 'trap' that comes to mind.

[SalHakim]

I think that there is a much better approach to taking up more of the search engine landscape than potentially using black hat techniques. Here is what I recommend.

1. Invest in PPC
2. Create a video on that product and submit to video sites such as Youtube.
3. Submit that product to Google Product Search
4. Create a blog post on that product that is useful to consumers
5. Talk about that product on Google Plus.

What people find useful ultimately is the best remedy for strong search engine rankings.

[Aran_Smithson]

Agreed with everything said above.

Google are trying to make the web a better place. By occupying the top 5 SERPs your attempting to reduce the options available to consumers which ruins the customer experience and as such i think Google would take a dim view on it.

Although, my company sells on ebay and amazon, aswell as our own website. For many of our key terms we occupy 3 of the top 10 listings, one for our website, one for our ebay store/product page and again for amazon listings.

Our review centre lising is not far from top 10 when searching for a particular phrase too.

[AdenBrands]

Thankyou for the above points.

I think it's worth pointing out that our keywords are Niche, so although there are a lot of competitors we currently are the mojor brand representing our service.

What we are looking to do here is create new websites, each branded individually offering the same service.

Yes we may be cutting down a consumers choice in reality, but is that an issue when our business core is to offer the best service possible?

I understand that morally this is a grey area. BUT. Has anyone actually attempted or done this with individual sites rather than other methods.

Thanks,

[EGOL]

I personally believe, from watching my own SERPs carefully over many years, that google now will throttle a second or third website from same company that competes in a single SERP.

Just as you sometimes see PAGES on one website swap positions, I have seen entire WEBSITES owned by one company swap positions in the SERPs.   For example... Website A has pages ranking at #3 and #4.... Website B has pages ranking at #13 and #14.   I have seen them switch to Website B at #3 and #4 and Website A at #13 and #14.

[AdenBrands]

Ok that is interesting!

So the next question is how are Google determining who owns which website? Are they using who is data? Or something else altogether?

[EGOL]

These websites have public whois information.  But google is a registrar and might be able to see behind private whois.

[MassivePrime]

Since you are trying to dominate the first 5 positions because you want people to buy from you I would recommend building a new site from scratch with the following:

• Different domain registrar
• Different hosting company
• Different content
• Different link profile
• Different site design

...you get where I'm going.

I can vouch that having done this for a certain client of mine it is indeed possible to dominate a keyword but you have to pose a competing company.

We did this because we had a client who owned 2 hotels with 2 different names that were right across the street from one another in London. In our case we were also able to register two Google places listings.

I was personally uncomfortable about doing this as room service was provided by the same chamber maids, the food by the same chef and the prices were identical. The only difference was in who manned the reception area and the decoration of the rooms...

If you are currently number 1 for most of your keywords but you feel that some people are buying from your competitors there must be a reason and creating a duplicate of your site won't help even if you have the first 2 pages covered. I would invest my time in finding out why. Could it be the prices, the product itself, delivery options, site structure, the images you use etc?

I would  build the new site, not to trick customers into buying from me, but to learn what their preferences are and then apply them to my main site.

[Nola504]

A hotel brand dominating serps?

Seems near impossible with all the clout OTA's have.

How do you guys pull it off?