Bing ranking a weak local branch office site of our 200-unit franchise higher than the brand page - throughout the USA!?

[scottclark]

We have a brand with a major website at ourbrand.com.   I'm using stand-ins for the actual brandname.

The brand is a unique term, has 200 local offices with sites at ourbrand.com/locations/locationname, and is structured with best practices, and has a well built sitemap.xml.  The link profile is diverse and solid. There are very few crawl errors and no warnings in Google Webmaster central.  Each location has schema.org markup that has been checked with markup validation tools.  No matter what tool you use, and how you look at it t's obvious this is the brand site.  DA 51/100, PA 59/100.

A rouge franchisee has broken their agreement and made their own site in a city on a different domain name, ourbrandseattle.com.  The site is clearly optimized for that city, and has a weak inbound link profile.  DA 18/100, PA 21/100.  The link profile has low diversity and generally weak.  They have no social media activity.  They have not linked to ourbrand.com <- my leading theory.

**The problem is that this rogue site is OUT RANKING the brand site all over the USA on Bing.  **Even where it makes no sense at all.  We are using whitespark.ca to check our ranking remotely in other cities and try to remove the effects of local personalization.

What should we do?   What have I missed?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Scott,

I have seen a similar, but not identical, issue reported numerous times in the Google Places Help Forum, in which a branch office is outranking the main headquarters of the business in Google. See threads like this one:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/business/main$20location/business/Bov09hyd1LM/AuIjdGSy_YYJ

Basically, when this comes up, the advice typically given is that there is no way to force the search engine to choose one location over another, and that the only thing the owner can do is to work on building the authority of the main location in hopes that Google will catch on.

Your situation is different in 3 important ways:

1. You're talking about Bing, not Google.

2. You're dealing with a broken contract and apparently don't have control over the branch office.

3. Your assessment is that the authority of the main office already far surpasses that of the branch office.

Unfortunately, I don't have an easy answer for you here, but I do have a suggestion. I recommend that you try Bing's support chat to see if you can talk to a live person about the issue:

https://sales.liveperson.net/hc/18987408/?cmd=file&file=visitorWantsToChat&site=18987408&byhref=1&SESSIONVAR!skill=bing-support-us-english

You need to be able to share the actual details of the business - not use stand-ins - of course. Without the real data, no one will be able to assess what is going on, so hopefully, you have the permission of the client to share their info with something like a live chat. I'd be very interested to hear what the rep tells you.

If you don't get anywhere with this, I would recommend hiring a heavy hitting SEO, with whom you can share full details, to help you audit the situation. Someone who is highly experienced with Bing and Local would be my pick, but this may not be easy to find, as Local is so Google-centric, because of Google's dominance.

I hope I've given you at least a starting point here.

[scottclark]

I used to think of myself as a heavy hitter SEO  LOL

I'd welcome any other answers on this, and will try to talk to Bing.

If I find a solution I'll report back.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Scott,

No offense intended. We all run into problems we don't know how to solve. This is pretty specialized - someone who not only knows Bing really well, but also, whether there are issues with their local algo that could result in a branch outranking a main office. It's the Bing part of this that I think makes the question hardest. I feel like I'm pretty good at Local SEO, but because of Google's dominance in this sphere, I simply don't know enough about Bing to have ready, helpful examples for you. Sorry about that, and I really do hope you can get this sorted out. I'd love to hear what you learn.