SEO issues : Have you ever had any name issues on search engines ?

So here’s my experience about that. My friend has a band named Silent Opera, which is a progressive metal band, with some death metal influences.

They all come from France and started touring in Europe few years ago. The band started being active in 2007 in Bayonne, France and produced two albums, one in 2010 called “Act One” and the second in 2014 called “Reflections”. They also have two recent singles named "Chasing Ghost" and "Dehumanization" released in 2017 with music videos you can see on their Youtube channel.

The band is active and has done 2 major tours in Europe, one of which with the band Orphaned Land during their “Mabool 10th anniversary tour”.

But here’s the trick. There is a band also called Silent Opera, from Italy. The band is a symphonic metal band, so even if it’s still in the Metal genre, any one can hear the two bands are different by the music composition and imagery.

The Italian band was created after the French band and is not active anymore since 2013, but all the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc) mix up the two bands in the results. Youtube results are also a problem, most of the first videos in the results are the Italian band, even when the French band had new music videos, new albums coming out, live videos etc.

So a lot of problems are resulting from this, especially when fans want to listen to the French metal band that they’ve heard of, and they happen to see the Italian band video on Youtube. They want to hear progressive metal and end up on symphonic metal (need to precise that progressive death metal fans often don't listen to symphonic metal) and a lot of them don’t know there are two bands, get confused, and don't like the band, because it's not the one they were supposed to listen to.

On Facebook it’s the same story, part of the French metal band fans are going to like the Italian band page, even if the French band has 51k+ followers and the Italian band 4,2k followers.

I am voluntary trying to solve this problem for years, sent reclamations on Youtube, Google, even tried to reach the band, but nothing could be fixed. I hired two SEO experts for help, and none of them has been able to make the French band come on top of the results.

So if it was your case what would you do ? When a band the same name is not active anymore for years but you still get the consequences every day ?

Conclusion : does that mean that if you create a band and call it Metallica, it’s gonna get mixed up in the results too ?