Parked domain is first in search results
-
We have several brand related domains which are parked and pointing to our main website. Some of these websites are redirecting using a 302 (don't ask, that's a whole other story), but these are being changed.
But it shouldn't matter what type of redirect they are no? Since there has never been any traffic and they are not indexed?
But it seems that one of them was indexed: exotravel.vn. A search for our brand name or the previous brand name (exotravel and exotissimo) brings up this parked domain first! How can that be? The domain has never been used and has no backlinks.
exotravel.vn is redirecting and I submitted a change of address weeks ago to Google, but its still coming up first in all brand name searches for exotissimo or exotravel.
-
Hi,
I pointed out that Google is a web registrar to elude to the fact they can search registered domain names and return those as results. Google can WILL also use anchor text and links from any site they find a link to your site. Even if you disallow crawling via robots.txt. If somebody is linking to you and Google finds it, and there are no more appropriate results they will return it when somebody searches those keywords.
I would say first your main issue is the redirect. Second you must not have a strong enough keyword profile or you just launched and have not given Google enough time to get an updated SERP out. Either way fixing the redirect should be your primary focus.
To answer your question sorry for being blunt here, the reason the parked domain is out ranking your live domain is because as far as Google is concerned it is the most relevant result. There is social media, it is registered and there is a cache of anchor text that is out ranking your live domain right now. You need to fix the redirect, build a link profile on new domain and give it time.
It may not make much sense if you look at it from only your side. But Google isn't a magic genie that can update billions of SERPs every minute. The best thing you can do is help them help you.
By fixing the redirect you tackle the issue 2 ways. 1. Even if Google returns your parked domain the user is sent to the correct domain. Second Google will see the redirect and index it appropriately thus removing the ranking from the parked domain.
I hope this helps and I didn't mean to sound rude if it came off that way,
Don
-
Hi Don, thanks for the input. The IT director had tried to point the DNS to a new web host so we can control the redirect correctly, but it doesn't seem to be propagating, thus we returned it to the default registrar redirect of a 302. Further background and context and actions below...
-
My apologies, but while I was outlining the problem in the original post, our IT director had updated the DNS to point to a host, wherein we have placed the 301 in an htaccess file. Thats why the lookup failed... and continued to fail, so it looks like the registrar also has a propagation problem, so we returned to the default 302 redirect for now...
The issue appears to be complex:
The DNS registrar for .VN domains seems to have a variety of issues with their DNS hosting, not least of which is that their URL redirect entry type will only function as a 302 redirect, not a 301.
This however does not really address the core problem. How is it that this domain is ranking first for all of our brand name searches?
- The domain has no wayback history
- It has never been actively used or linked to and has no backlink profile, outside of junk domain listings and the odd random backlink
Whereas our main domain has history and a very large backlink profile, albeit inherited through a change of address and 301's from the established name which we changed November last year.
Timeline:
November 2014 - all is well, business as usual, good search volume, successful recovery from a manual penalty... things are looking rosy. Company plan to change domain name is activated...
November 13th 2014 - Domain change goes ahead, all done according to guidelines with full 301s and Google Domain Name Change request
13th November - 19th November 2014 - 40% drop in search traffic! Argghhh.
20th November 2014 > So begins the research and recruitment of various SEO people to investigate. Nobody can see anything specific as to why the impact would be so huge as a result of the domain change. General consensus is that the following have played a part:
- Full re-evaluation of the site according to updated Panda and Penguin algo's, results in % loss: recoverable through fixing backlink profile, technical SEO and DMCA requests.
- Domain age and trust change would result in traffic loss, nobody has said how much or if it really happens.
- 301 redirects have an implicit reduction in value of between 0% - 15%, depending on who you believe.
4th January 2015 > overnight searchs for our previous and current brand names return exotravel.vn though we do not notice this for a couple of weeks. The domain itself is one of many local domains that have been parked for years and not in use.
end Jan 2015 > We realise the indexing of all brand names is now returning exotravel.vn.
- Feb 3rd - we set up GWT for the new domain and submit a change of address
10th Feb > Try updating the DNS to 301, cannot do it in the regstrars DNS management, and their support is non existent/unresponsive
17th Feb > Try pointing the domain to web host, doesn't work, DNS does not propagate. Added the 302 redirect back until FPT Telecom are back from Chinese new year holiday (they don't answer the phone and have an autoresponder saying they will be back next Tuesday! Seriously.)
What now? Any insight appreciated as this has me completely stumped! How can this parked domain now be ranking higher than our established and publicised domains!?
-
My apologies, but while I was outlining the problem, our IT director had updated the DNS. Further feedback below.
-
A couple things.
First Google is also a Web Registrar so they have the ability to know what domains are registered. It appears that Google has a cached version of the domain exotravel.vn indexed. It also appears to have Social Media exposure.
The redirect if setup is not correctly working. A ping and Whois search on http://exotravel.vn/ brings up no response from the server. Check the mxtoolbox entry here
Once you fix your 301 redirect issue, and have content ready for those keywords submit a site map to Google and give it some time to update.
Hope this helps,
Don
-
HI,
I doesn't look like exotravel.vn is redirecting right now, I get a 'page is not available' message so first thing to do is make sure the 301 redirect is set up and working as you expect it so that anybody clicking on that result will get to the right page. A look at the page cache shows that a coupe of days ago the site seemed to be returning normal content (it wasn't parked in other words but was actually serving html content). So between the redirect not working as expected and the site returning content until recently it is likely a bit confusing to google in regards what results it should/should not be showing for a branded search. If the redirect is implemented properly I expect the .vn site should fall out of the serps pretty quickly.
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
-
English and French under the same domain
A friend of mine runs a B&B and asked me to check his freshly built website to see if it was <acronym title="Search Engine Optimization">SEO</acronym> compliant.
Technical SEO | | coolhandluc
The B&B is based in France and he's targeting a UK and French audience. To do so, he built content in english and french under the same domain:
https://www.la-besace.fr/ When I run a crawl through screamingfrog only the French content based URLs seem to come up and I am not sure why. Can anyone enlighten me please? To maximise his business local visibility my recommendation would be to build two different websites (1 FR and 1 .co.uk) , build content in the respective language version sites and do all the link building work in respective country sites. Do you think this is the best approach or should he stick with his current solution? Many thanks1 -
Google place listings and search results- quick question.
Has anybody else noticed that they are ranking better on 'places' yet they have dropped off in the actual search results? We've had no message through webmaster tools. The same seems to have happened to our competitors.
Technical SEO | | onlinechester0 -
Domain Name Acquisition
Hi Anyone know how to get contact details for a domain owner beyond those provided by the likes of whois, archive etc etc ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Should a 301 from a penalised domain to a new domain be removed?
A business traded on a domain let's say example.COM which was heavily penalised due to non-removable spammy back links. Their previous SEO advised them to set up on example.CO.UK but redirected example.COM to example.CO.UK. Example.CO.UK ranks very poorly, presumably due to being 'tarred with the same brush' i.e. attributed with the ills of example.COM. Will it do any good to remove the redirect or is example.CO.UK now doomed as well?
Technical SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy1 -
Why the rapid drop in Domain Authority?
I couple weeks ago I switched my website from Drupal to a Wordpress CMS: Martial Arts Austin My rankings have remained the same, but the Domain Authority has plummeted from like 29 to 21. I know this is small fry, but I don't want my business to drop in ranking. The URL's were kept exactly the same, with the internal links and copy also kept the same with few additions. Also, according to Open Site Explorer, the site's stronger pages have now averaged out with the weaker and unused pages so they all now share the same Page Authority - that doesn't seem right. Is there reason for concern? Did I screw something up, or am I making too much of this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve1 -
What Google uses in search result descriptions
Recently, Google has started including certain information from our web pages in their search results description that is a bit puzzling. For example if you google 'Wedding Band Raleigh' the description they are using for our site's (GigMasters) page begins with the text 'Results 1 - 10 of 1005' Not sure why they are pulling that information. That is in on the page but its not high up on the page or marked with any special h1, h2, or h3 tag. We do have that information inside of a div which we have named 'Results'. Maybe that's why? Did we inadvertently use some sort of Google rich snippet or schema.org naming convention?! Any insight would be hugely appreciated.
Technical SEO | | gigmasters0 -
New Sub-domains or New Directories for 10+ Year Domain?
We've got a one-page, 10+ year old domain that has a 65/100 domain authority that gets about 10k page views a day (I'm happy to share the URL but didn't know if that's permitted). The content changes daily (it's a daily bible verse) so most of this question is focused on domain authority, not the content. We're getting ready to provide translations of that daily content in 4 languages. Would it be better to create sub-domains for those translations (same content, different language) or sub-folders? Example: http://cn.example.com
Technical SEO | | ipllc
http://es.example.com
http://ru.example.com or http://example.com/cn
http://example.com/es
http://example.com/ru We're able to do either but want to pick the one that would give the translated version the most authority both now and moving forward. (We definitely don't want to penalize the root domain.) Thanks in advance for your input.0