Are Your Search Results All From the Same Company or Person?

Search engine marketing refers to using certain practices to boost your website’s search result position in search engines like Google and Bing. Nowadays a new strategy has emerged that people are using by using microsites and having several different domains. For example this is discussed in several posts over at Modern Dental Marketing see for example http://moderndentalmarketing.com/2013/05/faqs-about-dental-blogs/ as a strategy that they use to improve the ranking of their clients website. In this post Shauna Duty (author on May 7, 2013) says

“At MDPM Dental, we’ve been creating blogs that act as microsites for three years now! Some of our client dentists hold 70-90% of the page-one Google real estate for a keyword phrase. Generally, Google shows 10 organic listings on page one, so I’m saying that some of our clients have 7-9 listings on a page one search result.”

Now I personally feel this practice is somewhat unfair. If you really wanted to dominate the competition a person or company could buy a large number of domains with different hosts or have other entities or persons do so on their behalf. Then they would develop each of these sites with their own unique targeted message. If successful this could ensure when someone searches for a specific keyword that all of the results or nearly all of the results will direct to websites and pages managed and controlled by a specific person or entity.

Right now it doesn’t really look like any of the search engines can easily detect this if you play your cards right. However, it is very time consuming and of course will be much more costly than having just one website.

If you are a patient concerned about your health and looking online for health information, it is important to understand that many different sites appearing in a search engine for the keyword you are looking for can all be owned by the same person or entity. If you can identify an instance of this such as what is alluded to by Modern Dental Marketing above, you might be able to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and see if they will attempt to take up this issue. So far this is flying under the radar to my knowledge and is tough to regulate and identify.

Currently, search engines don’t let a specific site rank more than a few times for the same keyboard in a search engine. However, of course you may be able to do so even if you don’t create numerous other sites with different domains by creating pages on Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, Linkedin, and other channels.