Is there a way to let Google know our brand
-
Hi, our company name is trophycentral, but many companies are linking to us as trophy central (with a space in betwen trophy and central). We are seeing this in many links and I have a feeling that google is penalizing us for it (since we used to be on page one for trophies and tophy and now off the charts). Is there a way to let Google know this, maybe some sort of tag? Thanks!
-
Joshua, thanks for taking so much time to respond. To answer your questions:
1. yes, I am using google webmaster tools. I also confirmed there were no manual actions agianst us.
2. noticed the drop in March. Most of our site is fine, but the drop was about 25-30% of our traffic that we were getting from a couple of keywords that disappeared completely. That's why I am pretty sure it is Penquin related - both the timing and the fact that the words didn't move down, but rather disappeared. However, I have had several people look and they can't find anything that looked "fishy".
Thanks for all of the suggestions. I will take another look at the title tags - I thought I had most between 35 and 70 characters now. I know we have an issue with the thin descriptions - we have many products that are very similar (ex. 500 award certificates that are all the same except for the title and image and it is hard to write flowery content that is different for all 500! Same for our trophies!). I will also look at adding the branding to the titles.
Penguin is really killing us and I am just hoping something works! Thanks again!
-
Jamie, thanks very much. I am ranking #1 for TrophyCentral, but dropped off the charts for trophies (we had been on page 1 for many years), so we are pretty sure it is a penguin issue, but we have not been able to figure out what's causing the problem. We have no manual actions against us.
I have been reluctant to change the home page focus too much since I thought the home page was the most "powerful" and trophies are a big focus item for us. I also noticed our competitors have a similar setup (ex. crownawards is #1).
I hear what you are saying though, so maybe I will reduce the focus to a different variation and more focus (like trophy | trophies and awards | from TrophyCentral) and then change the trophies page to be just focused on trophies.
Would this make sense? Thanks!
-
The fact that folks link to you with a space in between and without and other variations is a good thing. That doesn't affect how Google views your brand. In fact it helps you cause it allows you to have a link profile that looks natural with lots of variations around the term trophy etc.
If you search for your brand name with spaces or without you can see that Google clearly recognizes your brand since they show your site first and with a decent set of sitelinks below your homepage link in the SERPS. If they didn't "understand" your brand name they wouldn't do that.
One thing that could help is that on each of your pages of the site I noticed you don't use your brand name on the page title. It is common to do something like this: " Sports Medals and Awards - Trophy Central" While that isn't the greatest title ever it is there to quickly illustrate that on nearly every URL if you have your branding in the title at the end or beginning whichever is best for you, that gives another signal to the engines as to what your brand is.
In looking at a sampling of 500 URL's for your site only 5 of them come close to meeting the standard length of 70 characters or so that Google shows in the serps. It is a tedious job, but handcrafting non keyword stuffed titles can help greatly in influencing what people are clicking on when your site shows in Google.
As for not showing for search queries that is a bit puzzling. I looked at your backlink profiles and didn't see any glaring problems there. I looked at the code on your site and while very bloated it wasn't anything un crawlable. You have 25,300 pages indexed in Google. That appears to be quite a bit especially since you have just over 7,000 pages listed in your .XML Sitemap, so you may have some duplicate content issues to resolve and your URL's are not very clean but again not a glaring reason to be not showing at all. I notice you have Google Webmaster Tools code on the site, have you received any notifications from them recently? Have you logged into GWT to check things out there?
Your product descriptions are quite thin as well. Which overall isn't good but again probably wouldn't have affected rankings overnight. When did you first notice the drop? I would fix as much as you can on the site like page titles, urls, dup content and give Google a little bit of time to see those changes and that should help. Hopefully someone else on here can take a look and offer some more advise about why the drop might have happened. 1st blush looks like a number of things all piling up and the penguin update might have pushed you down. Take care.
-
Thanks, Raymond! Sounds like some easy things I can try! Much appreciated!
-
For your ranking concern, there could be many factors involved and without a lot more details we cannot be sure the issue is related to the brand name at all.
About the brand name, the first recommendation would be to dedicate your home page to the brand. Your current title is "Trophies | Plaques |Trophies and Awards | Medals | TrophyCentral". You are targeting 5 keywords which is a very bad move from a SEO point of view. If that was my site the home page title might be "TrophyCentral".
Not only are you targeting too many keywords with your page title, you are also cannibalizing your own site as you have other pages focused on trophies and other keywords.
Raymond shared some good advice. You can further establish your brand on your home page by focusing on it.
-
Not sure if it will help, but if your business has a physical address you can try registering it with google places (and other well known online business directories). This can take time as they mail verification to your address, but it would be worth it.
You may also try to get your name trademarked in the country you are in. That would help give you business more legitimacy in the eyes of google.
And finally try to get some of your back links to be labeled with the full business name, so something like 'trophy centrall LLC' or whatever applies to you. That may also help.
Good luck.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
Google Bot Noindex
If a site has the tag, can it still be flagged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | MayflyInternet0 -
About how google works
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
I want to ask a basic question. If I search for Larry Page lets say.
I think google look for it's index for word larry and page distinct.
And mix it up. But the question ;
Can google show a result which only Larry exist on the page but any of the synonym or the stem of the Page not exist .
If it can happen how this page can be showned in larry page query. Thank you.0 -
Does Google know what footer content is?
We plan to do away with fixed footer content and make, for the most part, the content in the traditional footer area unique just like the 'main' part of the content. This begs the question, do Google know what is footer content as opposed to main on page content?
Technical SEO | | NeilD0 -
Google Penalty?
Hi, I have recently been asked to help www.mycanvas.ie I have a feeling they have a google penalty. All their Google Keywords have literally dropped out of the Google SERP but they are still shown on Yahoo SERP. I recently did a site:www.mycanvas.ie and the pages are still in google index. The only thing that comes to mind is that the site owner submitted to 380 web directories over a period of 2 months with http://www.directorymaximizer.com/ do you think this could be causing the problem with google? Advise and suggestions are welcomed, thank you.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Google Fresh Update
Here's a question, if you put the date in your url (often a wordpress format) would that be seen by Google now as 'fresh' content? - part of their new update.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Quality analytics without Google?
I'm trying to find a program or a site that will give me quality traffic data. If I'm going into a presentation or simply a round one meeting I like to prepare a 1 pager with info I've found. Without authentication access to their Google Analytics I feel like I'm a step behind. Any Help would be greatly appreciated. -JoeGrrrcia
Technical SEO | | JOEGRRRCIA0 -
Google Places and Name Change
Hello - I have a client who is a realtor and changed agencies. I edited their Google Places entry and the new name of their agency and address are showing - but so is their old listing. The agency they left is now trying to sue them for showing up in a number one position with Google Places under their agency name. Is this an indexing issue with Google? Their name shows up under both agency names. The corrected one shows most often, but the old one is still popping up on occasion. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seoessentials1