I've been asked to find a way to reduce the visibility of a domain in Google SERPs for specific search terms, without damaging other, strong ranking terms. It relates to competitive client & product brand names. Reducing density of those terms in pages and ensuring they are not in the anchor text of backlinks are two possible methods that might influence this. Anyone have any other ideas?
He clearly said that he wanted to lower ranking for certain terms, "without damaging other, strong ranking terms" If he made the page noindex, it would remove the entire page, making it not rank for ANY term, clearly what he did not want to do. For someone with so much rep, you are giving some pretty horrible advice, I hope you edit your post so he doesn't listen to you and then wonder why it can't be found on google via any search term.
Well I said it with a question mark, I was asking if it was suitable? Why destroy the pages usability to users? if you dont want it to rank just keep it as it is and noindex it.
If the page is noindexed then it will not rank for all of the target keywords. Some clarification: The page ranks well for four target keywords (plus a bunch of long-tails), but has become unintentionally ranked well for a fifth keyword - which is creating competitive brand issues. The page needs to drop down the SERPs for that fifth keyword only, while maintaining the strong rank for the others.
Its going to be hard to drop the ranking for it for one keyword, if you still want that page to rank for others. Can you remove any onpage mentions of the one you don't want to rank for? If you have that phrase as backlinks, can you contact the people who gave you the link and ask them to alter it slightly?
Yes and (in most cases) yes. That's what we already have planned and are starting out with this week, so will be interesting to see how this pans out.
The solution (in case you're interested) was to come at this from a non SEO perspective... The problem is the competitive brands (those branded terms for which we need to be less visible in the SERPs) are unhappy because we are sometimes outranking them. Those specific brand terms are not important to our SEO strategy and we have ranked for them unintentionally. The relationship between the business elements in this is complex so I'll not go into detail. The idea we have is to check the refer when someone hits the site from a search engine and if they have searched for one of those specific brand terms, we do a redirect to the brand's site. This pacifies the competitive brands by ensuring they are not losing SE traffic for their branded terms. The brands seem happy, and we don't have to do anything that might jeopardize the strong SERPs for our other, target, terms.