Can you please decrease my SERPs ranking?
Published by on October 24th, 2008
That is a question I was recently asked. For the first time in all my years being involved in SEO, I was asked to find a way to reduce the Google visibility of a number of site pages for specific keywords.
A site I help to SEO has a number of pages ranking well in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for some specifc, targeted keyword phrases. They also, inadvertently, rank well for a number of other phrases that related specifically to brand names of the site’s clients. This competition for the brand names has created some issues and so I was asked to reduce the rank for those brand searches - without reducing the ranking for all the other target keyword phrases.
De-optimisation?
The first thought was to remove as many instance of the troublesome keywords from each of the ranking pages. The difficulty is that these brand names are legitimately used in the pages, and often are part of the main target key phrases. Removing them would reduce legibility and context of the page for visitors.
Reducing the on-page frequency of the keywords was certainly possible - if the resulting effects on SERPs was unknown - but backlinks were another matter. Incoming lnks to these pages also contained the troublesome keywords, and getting all these changed would be tricky and again damage legibility and relevance of the link to users.
Sometimes SEO does not have the answer
It took a non SEO person to come up with a very different solution to the problem. Stepping away from an SEO-focused solution, what if the search traffic generated from the troublesome branded searches was simply redirected to the client sites? Not SEO, but may resolve the problem.
Whether this becomes a viable solution or not, it was a big lesson in how focusing too narrowly on the problem, and forming early assumptions on where the solution might lie, clouded the creative, problem solving process. Sometimes, you just need to step away from SEO and broaden the possible solutions.
2 Responses to “Can you please decrease my SERPs ranking?”
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I believe you can easily do it by targeting on page factors. Maybe, removing links to the pages you don’t want to be displayed in results. There are quite a few on page SEO things that may help in this regard.
Replace text with images… could work to totally wipe that words.