Secondary Domain Outranking Master Website
-
IEEE is a large professional association dedicated to serving engineers. The IEEE Web Presence is made up of flagship sites like IEEE.org, IEEEXplore, and IEEE Spectrum, mid-tier sites like Computer.org, and smaller sites like those dedicated to specific conferences.
It is unclear exactly when this started - but searches in Google for [ieee] currently return ieeeusa.org before ieee.org. This is troublesome, as users are typically looking for IEEE.org with such a general query. ieeeusa.org is a site that has a much narrower focus - it is dedicated to public policy.
IEEE.org is one of the strongest domains - I am thinking that this is a glitch of some sort. I am removing a stale sitemap that is referenced in robots.txt (though again, I'm not seeing any issues with other pages - its just two queries that are trouble: [ieee] and [about ieee]. And its noticeable in analytics
http://ieee.d.pr/hMg0/YhklCw7Z
What do you think?
-
Hi Thomas,
As Vahe said, searching from outside of the US is bringing up the .org site first, so I agree that this is probably a geolocation issue. The .org has many times more backlinks than the US site. It's essentially a glitch, but one Google has probably done with the best of intentions, meaning to show US content to a US audience. Is the US site geotargeted to the United States in Webmaster Tools? Unless the site has some rankings that you are very concerned not to lose, try removing that geotargeting for now and monitor results for about four weeks.
-
Thomas,
I reckon this is just a geo personalisation factor and not an issue with site authority or optimisation. What I mean by this is, is that because you are based in the US and the IEEE US website is more strongly associated with a US audience, then Google is likely to rank the US domain first.
When I do a Google US search I see the exact same "issue" issue you are having - https://www.google.com/search?q=ieee&gl=us&pws=0
But I don't see this issue here when searching from Australia - https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ieee&pws=0. In fact the US domain doesn't appear at all on the first page.
To have the IEEE domain outranking over the US, there are two on-page elements you could potentially focus on:
1. Content - IEEE USA has a alot more content implicitly targeting "IEEE" on the homepage. Providing overview content about the organisation, can probably help with providing context and initial value to users to define a brief org background and how they can use the site.
2. Cannonicalisation - Cross link between all IEEE owned websites (maybe in the footer) to provide signals to Google that these sites all essentially sit under the IEEE brand. And because the IEEE.org site is the most authoritative, there is a higher likeliehood of the site outranking the other.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Vahe
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
-
What would be the best course of action to nullify negative effects of our website's content being duplicated (Negative SEO)
Hello, everyone About 3 months ago I joined a company that deals in manufacturing of transportation and packaging items. Once I started digging into the website, I noticed that a lot of their content was "plagiarized". I use quotes as it really was not, but they seemed to have been hit with a negative SEO campaign last year where their content was taken and being posted across at least 15 different websites. Literally every page on their website had the same problem - and some content was even company specific (going as far as using the company's very unique name). In all my years of working in SEO and marketing I have never seen something at the scale of this. Sure, there are always spammy links here and there, but this seems very deliberate. In fact, some of the duplicate content was posted on legitimate websites that may have been hacked/compromised (some examples include charity websites. I am wondering if there is anything that I can do besides contacting the webmasters of these websites and nicely asking for a removal of the content? Or does this duplicate content not hold as much weight anymore as it used to. Especially since our content was posted years before the duplicate content started popping up. Thanks,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Hasanovic0 -
Multiple E-commerce website
Following is a scenario where we plan to have a single database and different sites pulling product information from this. There will be a primary site with all the products listed and then there will be other category based website with the same products. All transactions will happen on respective website. The common factor will be products and its information. Our question is should we have different item numbers for the same product listed on two websites or they can be the same.?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | promodirect
e.g.
Website A: Product - Blue Shoes and item number '123'
Product page url will be: websitea.com/blueshoes-123.html Website B: Product - Blue Shoes and item number '123' or should the item# should be unique e.g. 'B123'
Product page url will be: websiteb.com/blueshoes-123.html
or
If item number is unique the product page url will be: websiteb.com/blueshoes-B123.html Please advise what is the best way forward.0 -
Penalty because of logo banner in sidebar of external website?
Dear mozzers, One of our pages is not ranking (well). I wrote another question about this here on Moz. I just discovered that there is an external website that has a banner to our page in the sidebar. The banner is on every 134+ pages of that site. It is in a banner slider and only show for a few seconds every now and then. The link is not "nofollow". It seems that our page dropped from Google slightly after this banner was added. However I am completely sure about this. The link is over here in the banner carousel/slider in the sidebar: http://www.wierszowisko.com/ My questions are: Could this banner log cause a penalty for our page? If so what can we do to undo this? Ask the webmaster to remove the link? Disavow on Google? How does this exactly work?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rdudkiewicz1 -
Suggest me a best plan for linking building chart for small static website.
Hi Everyone, Can any one suggest me a clear idea for off page link building chart i.e) Our page is a 24 page website we like to plan for off page activity like bookmarking, classifieds, directory bla bla bla. So how many links we are supposed to post and in how much day time gap example: 15 Links in bookmarking, 10 links in classified, weekly one article submission, after one week the same cycle goes on.....
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dineshmap0 -
How do you change the 6 links under your website in Google?
Hello everyone, I have no idea how to ask this question, so I'm going to give it a shot and hopefully someone can help me!! My company is called Eteach, so when you type in Eteach into Google, we come in the top position (phew!) but there are 6 links that appear underneath it (I've added a picture to show what I mean). How do you change these links?? I don't even know what to call them, so if there is a particular name for these then please let me know! They seem to be an organic rank rather than PPC...but if I'm wrong then do correct me! Thanks! zorIsxH.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Pages higher than my website in Google have fewer links and a lower page authority
Hi there I've been optimising my website pureinkcreative.com based on advice from SEOMoz and at first this was working as in a few weeks the site had gone from nowhere to the top of page three in Google for our main search term 'copywriting'. Today though I've just checked and the website is now near the bottom of page four and competitors I've never heard of are above my site in the rankings. I checked them out on Open Site Explorer and many of these 'newbies' have less links (on average about 200 less links) and a poorer page authority. My page authority is 42/100 and the newly higher ranking websites are between 20 and 38. One of these pages which is ranking higher than my website only has internal links and every link has the anchor text of 'copywriting' which I've learnt is a bad idea. I'm determined to do whiter than white hat SEO but if competitors are ranking higher than my site because of 'gimmicks' like these, is it worth it? I add around two blog posts a week of approx 600 - 1000 words of well researched, original and useful content with a mix of keywords (copywriting, copywriter, copywriters) and some long tail keywords and guest blog around 2 - 3 times a month. I've been working on a link building campaign through guest blogging and comment marketing (only adding relevant, worthwhile comments) and have added around 15 links a week this way. Could this be why the website has dropped in the rankings? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks very much. Andrew
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andrewstewpot0 -
Huge diifference linking root domains in SEO MOZ and opensite explorer
Hi there, I have fairly large site that has never really been optimised. I think an old forum i hosted has either been spammed or my webmaster at the time used some black hat techniques to get me more root linking domains. I am a newbie and would really appreciate if someone could just quickly look at my donain and confirm that this is a problem and something i should fix before i start my SEO campaign. I am also worried this will negatively effect my domain authority. I dont really want to broadcast my domain so if anyoone would be so kind to confirm the problem so i cant start to research the answer. Thanks v much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | nimble0