Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The answer to your question depends on what you want to build in the future and what you have already done now to speed things up.

Speed:
You may want to see if there are ways to even still reduce (compress) some of the usual suspects:
1. Compress your images better, size them properly, see what file formats can give you just as good quality for less file size.
2. Minify your HTML, CSS, javascript...(Wordpress plugins for this are available)
3. Move your linked javascript code that can be moved to the bottom of your html page
4. See if you are calling content from other domains or using full path calls in your code to different images as includes, if so make relative calls for what you can.
5. Check your server speed, the web host you are using may have a slow server response time, see if you can move your Wordpress site to a faster server.
6. Try CDN's for storing your images. 
7. The Google Page Speed test tool gives you what you need to do to help increase the pages speed, in the results it will give you the information on your server response time and how Fat your Images are... Make sure you have someone other than your developer look at these results to see if there are ways to cut the Fat and speed things up. If your UI is so image heavy that it is degrading your user experience, then you may want to modify that, things that look pretty are great but they can look pretty and work as well.

If you can first look at those issues and fix them, that will increase your speed. Then move to step 2 Caching.

Caching for Speed:
Once you've taken care of the usual issues above, try a caching plug to cache your Wordpress site, that way when new users are hitting your site in their browser they will get a cached (already rendered) version of the Wordpress site. This will load a lot faster! NOTE: Every time you make an update to your Wordpress site you will need to reload the CACHE. This is simple and done in the interface of the plug in. Take a look at the different Wordpress site cache plug ins and see which one will do what you need based on the other parts of your site.

If you guys have already done all of this and it is still too slow and you can't make any changes, you may have other issues to take care of that deal more with Usability and Design and that trade off with performance. A/B testing different landing pages for conversion can help you trim down your sites UI to get it to a place where customers can complete their transactions and it still looks amazing. You should definitely do this before you start building a full e-commerce solution.

Starting all over and adding E-commerce from scratch.
I will preface this by saying I was a code snob for many years. I wanted everything from scratch and even my IDE for writing code was bare bones. I've built systems alone and worked on huge teams that have built enterprise level e-commerce solutions. And now I would say this: If you can get 50% of the functionality you want out of using something like a bigcommerce or shopify or something similar, use it and focus on your core competency SELLING, PROMOTING, MARKETING your products! Spend the money you would developing an e-commerce platform on marketing the products you are trying to sell.

When you do things from scratch you have to be prepared to maintain them and grow them and make sure that it all still works together as it grows. This is a big undertaking especially if building e-commerce sites and new web features is not what you are an expert at. As a developer I loved to build new things and new features, I also hated to keep them up and do maintenance, and documentation... If you have a TEAM of developers then it is a little easier but still a big chore if building e-commerce platforms is not what you do. The sheer size of the code gets overwhelming at a certain point. That said using your own developers and building from scratch gives you the freedom to build anything you want. That freedom does have a price tag and a time investment.

Remember if you can use something like big commerce for your web store, integrate Wordpress for your blogging, and then your developers can build add on features that link into your store if you feel the platforms do not have the exact functionality you want. Also remember that switching UIs and doing testing to see what converts may be easier if you just have to click a few buttons to reroute traffic as opposed to thousands of lines of code to do the same thing.

PM me if you want any more advice, hope it helps and Happy Holiday!

Erick

On the Usability end I think that may be too much on the Category Page View. Remember if you are listing 12 dresses each with a video or animated GIF, that will be over kill for your users.

On the BigCommerce end I cannot see where you can modify the GLOBAL_CategoryListings which is what you would need to modify to have it display a different type of media on the category page.

If you wanted to trick this you might try using an animated GIF that just slowly rotates through the dress colors. But again this may be too much for your user.

You can also think about making a different product item for each color and organizing the categories in to dressName then dressColor being its own product. This is not something I would do, but it lets you display all the colors you want on the category page.

Hope that helps!
Erick

Hi Cesar,

I would think that changing it all at once may have both positive and negative effects for you based on what your current status is as far as the SERPS go. Use MOZ on page grader https://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader to check to see how your pages rank for the keywords you are targeting on each page. You can also check your rankings by running a report in MOZ. Then you can see where you stand. Next try switching a few, getting re indexed, check your SERPS and run the reports again.

But you may want to have your vendor try something else.

I would caution against a breadcrumb structure because it may not really help you. I am not familiar with your site, but in general Title tags can be used for both SEO and to increase click-through. What I mean is that you need the TITLE to look good in the SERPS so that people will click on them and go to your site. The same goes for the META Description, it is not used for SEO but it can be a great way to increase click-through by presenting a very short description of what the user will find on the page if they click your link.

You may be better off researching what it is you want these pages to rank for and then creatively optimize for that in your titles, descriptions, and all other on page content.

Hope that helps!
Erick

Hi Michelle,

I think it is interesting that those flags are only in your footer, are really small, have no explanation of their relevance, but that you still get good traffic to your language specific sites from them. That means that your visitors are making a connection with the flag icon. I would think about usability first in this situation. I might recommend that you design a navigation element that incorporates a CSS styled dropdown menu that includes the flag icons as a marker, I would also add something like:

Also available in your country: [LIST OF LANGUAGE/COUNTRY LINKS]

That way you do not lose the visitor that is currently going straight for the flags to get to their own language and you are able to update the navigational design.

I'm sure you are already going to do this but make sure you 301 redirect your old URLS to these new subdomains. Have you thought about not using subdomains and just using subdirectories instead. By using subdirectories you will help raise your main domain's authority. So something like www.simplesite.com/fr and www.simplesite.com/es ...

Lastly to retain any links you currently have to your existing sites, make sure you 301 linked to pages to relevant new pages in your subdomain or subdirectory new sites.

Hope that helps!
Erick

Hi Li!

We use big commerce for a couple of our online store clients and the features you are asking for are available but you have to do some modifications to your template in order to display it the way you are describing. It's not very intuitive to accomplish what you want but here is a brief explanation. Message me if you have questions:

1. Log in to bigcommerce -> go to: Products->View Products on the nav
2. Select the product you want to add video or multiple images to
3. When the product edit page loads click the tab that reads: Images & Video
4. At the bottom of the page you can add the YouTube Video link
5. You can also add multiple images and select a default image from this page. 
When the user visits your website they will see the default image in big and the rest of the images small, if they click on a small image it becomes the big image. The video is hidden under a menu item called PRODUCT VIDEOS

Getting your video to load at the top of the page takes an edit to your default HTML Layout. 
You can go to the link in the top right hand side of your big commerce dashboard screen marked DESIGN then click the EDIT HTML/CSS icon in the center of the screen. This will load a new window with a list of files on the left and a text editor on the right.
1.On this screen in the left nav go to the file product.html
Copy the contents of this file to a text (html) editor like sublime. You will use this file to add the video tags. 
2. Then go back to your browser with big commerce in it, on the top left file list go to: ProductDetails.html
3. When that loads then in that same top left file list: Go to ProductVideos.html
4. Go to around line 13 and copy from the <object>tag to the</object> tag. This copies the video display code. If you want to grab the video title, video description or the video div tag to hide the video on load, you can grab that code from this html page as well. 
5. Paste that copy into your NEW HTML file that is in sublime. Paste this code wherever you would like the video to show on the page. For top of the page under the menu but above the product details you can paste the code between the code that reads:

%%Panel.ProductBreadcrumb%%

PASTE YOUR COPIED CODE HERE

%%Panel.ProductDetails%%

6. You can modify the size parameters in the object and embed tags to fit the size you want to cover on the page. 
7. Depending on what template you are using the location of the files and line numbers may be different but the process is the same.
8. Once you have positioned your video code in this HTML file, you can save it from sublime by doing a save as and name it _product_with_video.html (the name of the file is up to you, but it should start with a _ (underscore) and end with .html
ex: _file.html 
9. Then you will need to upload this new file to your big commerce file manager.
10. Use Cyberduck to upload the files to the main directory.

Getting it to display right:
Once you have done all this you need to go back to PRODUCTS --> VIEW PRODUCTS in big commerce account manager and navigate to the product you want this layout for. Then once that page loads go to OTHER DETAILS tab and scroll half way down the page to the label that reads: TEMPLATE LAYOUT FILE: here select the file you just uploaded _file.html

Hit Save! Your done!

Take a look at your stores product page in a different browser window and you will see the video at the top of the page.

If you want to modify its location just modify the _file.html pages html in Sublime and upload the edited html page.

Hope that made sense.

Cheers,
Erick

Yes for screen readers and using it as alt and title for your images that are there. So you are not trying to trick Google, you are trying to figure out a way to mark what is actually there. For google image search, I have had success ranking images even if used as backgrounds in divs by naming them with what I was trying to rank them for. Since I could not use alt or title I named images with my target in them. These images were all for a brand query.

Example: image on mybrand.com named mybrand-imageName.png

we were able to get most of those images to show up when doing an image search for mybrand

I think that adding title to the div is the only way for you to do a background image in CSS.

You can cheat a little by then loading a transparent image in the container that the background image is in, make this transparent image have an alt tag and title tag for whatever your background image is about.

If you are doing this for seo purposes this should work, if you are doing it to have the html well formatted, there is only the div tag.

Cheers!
-Erick

Hi John,

I would go with www.child.com/blog

Here is why:

1. As you stated this structure ranks better due to your blog getting your domains authority.
2. As you gain page authority for your posts your domain will also benefit.
3. Your child content is most likely relevant to your child domain.
4. the way you have it set up right now you may not be getting the DA of your parent site anyway because it is set up as a subdomain. Double check but I believe Google sees sub domains as there own deal so the metrics for your main domain do not match up. Do some testing in MOZ OSE to check both your root domain, www subdomain, and blog sub domain you will see different values for DA and PA. You can also check this way on Majestic and your TF and CF will be different as well.

Strategy you may want to use is:

1. Move your blog to the child domain
2. New content should be posted here
3. You can syndicate the same post to the parent domain if you want, but make sure you use a rel canonical pointing to the original content at www.child.com/blog/post-name, that way you pass the credit back to the original post on the child domain and avoid duplicate content issues.
4. If you just want to get rid of the old blog, you can 301 the posts to the new post URLs, or rel canonical them pointing back to the NEW Original Content location at www.child.com/blog/post-name

Parent Child Relationship:
This is just my opinion based on what I have encountered. If you are a manufacturer, and you have multiple brands, it is totally ok for you to have a Manufacturers website, and websites for each of your brands. Think of Proctor and Gamble, they have a P&G website with pages that spotlight their brands, and then they have individual sites for each of their brands. The P&G parent site links to all of its children. I am sure it passes authority that way, but each of the brand sites have also built their own authority.

I believe the thing to look out for is, if you are building other sites to focus on brands or products, like P&G does, you should be fine. But if you are building child sites just so you can build links, like a PBN (private/public blog network) then you run a chance of getting a penalty. Just be careful and make sure you only try to get credit in one place and I think you will be all good. I am sure others have other thoughts on that, so you just have to make your own decision and track your progress to make sure you are getting the results you need.

Let me know if you have any questions, we have built the parent child relationships above before and it has worked great. No penalties and we are able to control most of page one for the traffic bringing brand related queries.

Using a subfolder has shown to rank better and faster than using a subdomain in tests I've done as well. Subfolder as mentioned by other lets you use your current domain authority to help your posts rank.

Secondly if you are producing great content and actively looking for ways to promote it, as that content is shared and linked to,etc... you are not only building the page authority of your post, but building the domain authority of the site itself.

Also keep in mind how and what you name your sub folders and blog posts as those are super important to help you rank for specific keywords as well.

User experience is also a good thing to keep in mind as the more comfortable the user is with your site, the better their engagement will be. So if navigating to your blog through your known domain is better, do that because your users will feel more comfortable with it and this should also help your engagement.

Hi Jess,

Set up a Google My Business profile for the location of your satellite office. Once you set it up Google will send you a physical post card through the US Mail with a code on it. Once you receive that post card log back in to the Google My Business Page of your satellite location, and input the code. Make sure you fill out the Google My Business profile for this location 100% plus add pictures of your location/business. Once you have done that you will receive your listing and pin in the maps. You can find a lot of tutorials online for how to optimize your google my business listing. If you need any help message me, I'd be happy to help answer anymore of your questions.

Another tip is to also add a picture to http://www.panoramio.com/ with your info. This is a google earth project. Just make sure your photo meets the guidelines. We did this and our listings show up. Not sure if it really does help or not, but it doesn't hurt.

Good Luck!
Erick

Hey Bob,

I'm sorry for your loss. I would start by taking a look at your past months traffic reports. Check your google analytics and webmaster tools/search console to see where the traffic was coming from the past 3 months pervious to this one. You are looking for traffic from keywords in organic search, but also for traffic from refers like Facebook or other social networks or sites. Compare the average of the previous 3 months to the current month to see where you are losing traffic from. In search console -> search analytics, you can turn on all the values: Clicks, Impressions, CTR, Avg. Position and then download that for each of the ways you can check: Queries, Pages, Countries, devices, search types. Get them all for the custom date ranges. Then compare the data, you should be able to see when you lost a bunch of traffic, and you may be able to see where you lost that traffic from, keyword positions you have lost, or channels that are not sending you as much traffic anymore.

In Google Analytics, do the same kind of investigation to cross check with your info from search console. Pay close attention in GA to traffic sources, and time on site, bounce rate... If you lost some traffic from specific sources see how you can repair that. If your time on site went down, maybe your latests posts are not engaging, if your bounce rate is now super higher, what dod you change on the landing pages that has caused that...

If you can identify where the loss in traffic came from by using the data from these 2 tools, you maybe able to identify why you lost that traffic. Example if you lost search position for your best keywords, go fix that. If you lost traffic from lack of engagement from specific social channel, go fix that or find a new social channel.

Lastly, if you happened to take part in some link building in a certain time frame and lost traffic then, fix that.

Hope that helps. Hit me up if you need any help.

This is a long answer

To get content to rank you need to have a good plan in place before you write the content and then patience after.

Make sure your content is something that people are interested in and are willing to share before you actually write it. Good content actually starts with keyword and viral research. So for example lets say your site sells dog collars. Instead of writing all your content about dog collars, you can think in more broad terms like: Dog collars for training purposes, Things you need to know about puppies, dog skin irritations, do prong collars hurt or help training... Do keyword research to find what these terms can be. (use google ad words to estimate traffic).

Next use content explorer from AHREFS to see what content having to do with your keywords has been viral in the last 24hrs to 6 months.
For Example: If you type in dog collars it shows that in the past 24 hours an article about "16 things you need to know about getting a puppy." has been shared on Facebook 4.2k times and retweeted 82 times. Narrow your keyword list to the top content ideas.

Next go to google, search your new keyword list to see what ranks for the them.

Next quickly use Moz Open Site Explorer to check the DA/ PA / and link and spam metrics of the guys on the front page of those results. Try to identify if there are sites you can knock out with a properly optimized piece and some links.

Narrow down your keyword list again based on your results and then you can run a keyword difficulty report on Moz. Run a FULL REPORT so you can see all the different variables that makes those sites rank. This can give you a strategy for what you will need to outrank what is already there.

Next start to write your content based on what is MOST SHARABLE SOCIALLY, what is MOST ATTAINABLE to rank for, and what shows decent traffic. Make sure you follow proper on page SEO. Use Moz On Page Grader to grade your content while you write it. Check the results. Adjust your content to get the best grade. You should also grade the competitor pages you are trying to outrank to make sure your on page SEO is at least as good or better than theirs.
Link Tip: see who the top sites are linking to and link to those resources or better ones. Research in Moz and Ahrefs and Majestic who is linking to the already ranking content. Try to see if there are ways to build links from those same places. Replicate what is making them rank, follows, no follows, as long as they are relevant are good.

After you are happy with your content it's time to distribute it. This part is the hard part.

Make sure you use Google web master tools / search console to Fetch and Render the new page. Then submit it to index.

Start your Social Distribution Campaign by first posting to your sites social media pages.
Check your visibility for the article by seeing how much it is shared, liked, retweeted...
If you are posting to a businesses Facebook page you can see how many people have viewed the post. You may be surprised to see that not too many people see posts at first due to Facebook's sharing algorithm.
There are 2 ways to get more distribution on Facebook, the easy way is pay for it, promote/boost your post or run an add with your post pointing to your content, make sure you target the ad to your preferred audience.
The harder way is to get engagement on your post (likes, shares, and comments) in the first hour(s) your post is published.
If you run an ad you can track conversions on sales or goals with Faceebook's pixel so that you can see people coming back and purchasing after the first visit. This pixel will also place your post/ad in front of visitors after they leave your site if they did not complete a transaction.

Hopefully you can get some traffic from here. Check your web analytics to see what networks sent better traffic. More conversions, more time on site, etc... Based on this data you can invest more time and money in promoting to that network as your target customers are more likely there than on the other networks.

Monitor the groups on these networks as well to see if your content can add value to the discussion in the groups. Word of caution DONT SPAM the groups it just looks bad for you in the long run. As with reputation management it is better to already be a part of the Group and have an established presence by sharing valuable content, so when you share content you're affiliated with as long as it adds value it wont be seen as SPAM and you won't get banned.

To see if Google has indexed your new page do a site:websiteURL search and check to see if your new page is listed.

Next search your target keyword and synonyms to see where you rank for those. Record your position.

Next you can use google to look for outreach points. Sites you can contact to do traditional link building. If your content is original and adds value to the conversation you have a better chance at getting good links. Don't worry if you don't get too many, this can be really hard depending on what you are writing about.

Check your Google Results positions regularly. (I do it every morning and again throughout the day).

Track your results and keep doing competitive research. As you learn more of what your competitors are doing, repeat your outreach process to get more exposure.

If you are a site with low authority you can have the most amazing content and still have trouble ranking or getting traffic. For example in the hair product space, L'Oreal will always have an easier time ranking a page than a small hair care brand. It can be done but it is a harder job because of the trust google places on Authority. To help rank less authority sites you need social presence and social importance.

Hope this helps. Make sure you track all of this in a spreadsheet of some sort, so the next time you launch a new piece of content you can just follow a blue print. MOZ's white board Fridays cover how to do a lot of this and Ahrefs has a great series called over simplified SEO that talks about all this in easy to understand terms. Let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
Erick

Hey Perry,

Here is a few things to look at:

1. Your site is way slow bro! 
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.querease.com%2F&tab=desktop
Try caching your WP site with a plug in. 
Optimize your images.
Seriously it took 20 seconds to load with a really good internet connection. That's way to slow.

2. You need more links and social to compete with other services like yours. You may want to have your experts be more active on social media, your own accounts as well. Your link profile should be clean too. Not too much spam.

3. Check out AHREFS.com and do a competitive analysis with your top competitors, see what they are doing better than you, then copy what they are doing to start. Once you get to doing this you will discover even more things you can do that your competitors have not done yet. All this will help you to rank in the future.

4. Because of your niche "ask a expert" you may want to consider youtube videos and daily motion videos that link back to the expert pages on your site. These are all no follow but you're not doing it for link juice you are doing it for authority and conversion.

Hope that helps!

Cheers,
Erick

Hi Keith:

1. Go to Search Console -> Search Traffic -> Search Analytics
By default it should have a check mark on Clicks and QUERIES selected, you'll see total clicks, graph and then all your keywords listed below.

2. CLICK Pages radio button
By default you will see Total Clicks, Graph, then list of pages

3. Click the _No Filter_arrow underneath pages 
You'll get a pop up where you can input a url
Select URL is then Input the URL of your popular page then click Filter Button

At this point you will see a Total clicks and graph, but no queries

4. Click on the QUERIES radio button now and there you go!
You will then see total clicks, Graph, and your queries
You can then check mark Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Position to show you all those metrics for that page and those queries.

To do a different page switch out the pages filter and repeat.

With all of Google's want for web masters to focus on UX.... They need a couple of UI guys to help them with work flows for these tools. So annoying. But hope that helps.

Hi Marc,

No worries! I hope it helps. Let us know in the thread what you do and if certain things help more than others.

I am currently running some tests on articles getting ranked and how to outrank competitors for specific keywords and then seeing if those keywords actually bring revenue. Also some reputation management stuff.

If you have any questions on any of that stuff feel free to message or email me. erick.at.brandsavvi.dot.com

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Erick

Hi Marc,

Especially if these changes are due to a recent update like you mentioned, it's just guessing but hopefully educated guesses will help for later.

I took a look at your competitors site and I think even though they have no text in the html, they do have:

1. Meta description with synonyms for logo creating
2. Title tag with synonyms for logo creation
3. They are using SKetch, which tells google it's some sort of a design tool
4. Maybe google is also looking at engagement time with the page through their analytics code, I know they say they don't use it, but maybe they do now.
5. Links out to Creative Commons Licensing page, lets them know it is related to something being created and shared and it is a good authority link out.
6. CSS classes are named like: logomaker-crop, logomaker-search ...
7.  They actually have a good amount of links as well with 1400+ in MOZ and over 8,000 in AHREFS (look at the root domain: http://logomakr.com/ their www subdomain shows lower amount of links only 30 and 175 respectively)
8. Really high DA nofollow links, could show relationship and authority (You should try to model what they've done to get these no follows).
9. Attribution links from sites (example:http://uwap.uwa.edu.au/pages/the-dorothy-hewett-award-for-an-unpublished-manuscript)  that have used their tool: EMK="Logo Maker" URL: http://logomakr.com/
10. 44% of the anchor text linking to this site is: logomakr: free logo design tools and the rest is split between exact match and variations of their URL.

As I'm typing this your at 19 for that keyword.
Suggestions:
1. Try to raise your DA your at 36 in comparison to 46 for your competitor.
2. Looks like you have a lot of your backlinks coming from Russia, if thats SAPE see what you can do, could be negatively affecting things, maybe disavow some or clean it up. In comparison your competitor has a diverse profile and his links come in higher proportion from UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia. 
3. It looks like recently your referring pages doubled... Could be a flag if those new links are all from #2
4. For your anchor terms, 44% are just: "logo" see if you can change that up especially if you control any of those links.
5. Take advantage of optimized youtube video pointed to your root domain in the description. Make a good video with proper optimization and good content so the engagement time is good. maybe a demo of your tool. Dailymotion.com is also high domain video site that can help you rank. You can also try to rank a video quickly with live youtube streaming  https://www.youtube.com/live_dashboard_splash

I think the biggest difference for you is that your tool is downloadable and theirs is in-browser. So their engagement will always be much higher. Lower bounce rate. etc... If you can create a tool like theirs with your features that is in-browser it would be a more apples to apples comparison.

Check also if they include links in their tools output to increase their links. So if you use their tool will it have some link to them in the output file, does it automatically link to them on the pages that implement their tool? You should also look at doing that yourself. A lot of tools build links this way and it's a great way to get good leads.

Hope that helps and I apologize if I got too detailed, I like doing research. Hit me up if you have any questions.

Cheers
Erick (different Eric)

Thanks for the link! I appreciate it, interesting that the person that they are interviewing is the ROR lawyer

I think the worst advice we got when this all started in 2010 was "Just ignore it, don't respond because you give it credibility". And I was stupid for believing that. Over the years it has been a huge thorn in our side with new business and a battle we keep having to fight every 6 months to try to bury it off the first page.

It's interesting you mention the ROR sites strength. I see its DA is high, but the page in question has no PA. and Trust Flow is 0 and Citation Flow is 11 from Majestic. This ROR page outranks us even though the link profile for the ROR page is non existent. 1 link to it in the last 60 days with DA of 16, PA of 13 and TF of 0 from the Linker. Yet it ranks. Does that change your thoughts on out ranking it? Just curious as I am just learning this all and those numbers seem week to me?

We are again optimizing our SEO on all our site pages to help us rank better, but in the past we were only able to get it down to number 8 when you search [brand name], so not off the front page. And if you search [brand name] review it has always stayed in the top 5, and now is ranking #1 and the only reason I can see is this bloggers link to it.

I am going to reach out to the blogger to see if they will delete the link, but I am not sure if that will start a different fire storm.

If any other business owners ever comes across this post I hope that they respond quickly to the negative reviews with a short professional response, and then be ready to answer the question when customers call. Also one of the things we had to learn the hard way is that as a business even a non technical/internet business you need to do online reputation management before something like this happens. Build up your good reputation so it is hard to tear it down. In our face to face business our reputation is stellar, online the first thing you see is this.

Thanks again for your comments and links. I appreciate you taking the time.

Cheers,
Erick

Thanks Alick,

Interesting that they were gone and then back so fast! Good link on ORM too, thank you.

I think it's strange the ROR itself is not penalized by google and delisted, I believe they violate the google TOS. Google search team doesn't seem to answer that  question about ROR either, it always turns into a debate of free speech and internet laws... it's really unfortunate for businesses that are wrongly attacked on these types of forums and can't get high enough DA and TF or good links to outrank for their own brand names.  I think google needs to understand that non tech businesses have a disadvantage in todays search eco system, and soon they will only have tech savvy results while real business solutions will be buried.

Thanks again! Cheers!
Erick

In 2010 we launched a product update (physical product) that was really good for us in sales and we were taking a lot of business from our main competitor. To stop the bleeding they posted a fake ripoffreport (completely made up pretending to be a former employee, we are a family business and employ few people with almost no turn over in the last 10 years). They also posted fake reviews on Google's local product at the time for any store that used to use their product but that had switched to ours.

We were able to get google to remove the fake reviews as there was no way one user visited over 100 stores and purchased the same service on the same day in all these locations around the US. But they would do nothing about delisting the report page without a court order.

So the fake google reviews went away, but the ripoffreport has become immortal. The reviews were originally posted anonymously and then commented on by another anonymous user. These same two anonymous users then filed ripoffreports against a couple of our mutual customers as well. Since they are anonymous we cannot sue anyone to get them to remove it, since it is passed the statutes of limitations we cannot do a john doe law suit to get a judgment by default. So the report is there to stay.

We have worked to get more content up about us, we have great product reviews on facebook and other outlets that have sold and spotlighted our products, and we are partnering with industry specific bloggers and traditional media content sites to get links and reviews (all white hat stuff, great public relations stuff), but we cannot get our interior pages, facebook pages, or the other reviews to rank higher than this report when searching for our brand name and even worse when you search for our "brand name reviews" it is the first result on google.

Can anyone help me understand how I can use MOZ to help me identify how to outrank this page with interior pages so that it falls off the front page of google? Sorry if that is a newbie question but I have done a lot of things and it has worked some but not as much as I need it to. And it seems that in the last few weeks the report has become stronger in the rankings again.

Any suggestions you could offer would be greatly appreciated.