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
-
Why Google crawl parameter URLs?
Hi SEO Masters, Google is indexing this parameter URLs - 1- xyz.com/f1/f2/page?jewelry_styles=6165-4188-4184-4192-4180-6109-4191-6110&mode=li_23&p=2&filterable_stone_shapes=4114 2- xyz.com/f1/f2/page?jewelry_styles=6165-4188-4184-4192-4180-4169-4195&mode=li_23&p=2&filterable_stone_shapes=4115&filterable_metal_types=4163 I have handled by Google parameter like this - jewelry_styles= Narrows Let Googlebot decide mode= None Representative URL p= Paginates Let Googlebot decide filterable_stone_shapes= Narrows Let Googlebot decide filterable_metal_types= Narrows Let Googlebot decide and Canonical for both pages - xyz.com/f1/f2/page?p=2 So can you suggest me why Google indexed all related pages with this - xyz.com/f1/f2/page?p=2 But I have no issue with first page - xyz.com/f1/f2/page (with any parameter). Cononical of first page is working perfectly. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Rajesh.Prajapati
Rajesh0 -
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 -
Google is ranking the wrong page
We are trying to figure out why google is ranking the wrong page for the key word motorcycle tires. We have a few ideas but are not sure yet. If you do a search for Motorcycle Tires you will see site on page 2 or top of 3; however, the page will be going to our dirt bike tires page (http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/44/86/176/742/Dirt-Bike-Tires-All) not our Motorcycle page (http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/49/-/181/750/Motorcycle-Tires-All) any thoughts? We think we know why but want others opinions too.
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Google Plus Places Error
We have a large amount of clients and when we are updating their Google Plus Places listing, the ad is still presented as active, however it is not live on Google and when you click to view the listing we get this message 'We currently do not support this location' I have researched this and found many people are having this issue, but no solutions as of yet. Can anyone shed some light on to this because some of our clients are not thrilled at the moment. Thanks Jon
Technical SEO | | Jon_bangonline0 -
Sitemaps for Google
In Google Webmaster Central, if a URL is reported in your site map as 404 (Not found), I'm assuming Google will automatically clean it up and that the next time we generate a sitemap, it won't include the 404 URL. Is this true? Do we need to comb through our sitemap files and remove the 404 pages Google finds, our will it "automagically" be cleaned up by Google's next crawl of our site?
Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Google places address missing
I have a google places acct that used to rank fairly well. Then i changed addresses and updated the places account. It stopped ranking and whats worse is that the address will not show up in the listing. I have gone back in and edited it, verified it, done everything, but the address does not show on the places page or google results. It shows the city but not the actual address. Ideas?
Technical SEO | | webfeatseo0 -
Pages not Indexed after a successful Google Fetch
I am trying to understand why google isn't indexing key content on my site. www.BeyondTransition.com is indexed and new pages show up in a couple of hours. My key content is 6 pages of information for each of 3000 events (driven by mySQL on a wordpress platform). These pages are reached via a search page, but no direct navigation from the home page. When I link to an event page from an indexed page it doesn't show up in search results. When I use fetch on webmaster tools the fetch is successful but is then not indexed - or if it does appear in results it's directed to the internal search page e.g. http://www.beyondtransition.com/site/races/course/race110003/ has been fetched and submitted with links but when I search for BeyondTransition Ironman Cozumel I get these results.... So what have I done wrong and how do I go about fixing it? All thoughts and advice appreciated Thanks Denis
Technical SEO | | beyondtransition0