Is Google having trouble determining between two of my brand sites

[GeorgeLaRochelle]

I have a couple brand sites that our company uses and a couple of weeks ago one started to suddenly show up in the #1 position while searching for the other site via its brand.

If I search for "collegexpress" our other site careersandcolleges.com is in the #1 possition.  If I search for "collegexpress.com" it shows carrersandcolleges.com's title and description but links to www.collegexpress.com

Could I have something messed up or is google confused with our two sites?  In the past I am told that CollegeXpress referred to the careersandcolleges.com page but that has been there for many many years and this SERP change only started to show the first week in march of this year.  I looked and there are a handfull of anchor text links from external sites using some form of the "CollegeXpress" brand linking to www.careersandcolleges.com but not that many,  and they are not new.

If I do a search the other way for "careersandcolleges" I see it correctly return is own site #1 but www.collegexpress.com is shown to me as #3.

I checked and we dont have any redirects or mod rewrites between the two sites.  They are on two different IPs

Any help that can point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Dr-Pete]

Oh, sorry - didn't realize those two pages were different. Can Google crawl the members page? I'm not completely clear where the ref= version is coming from.

Actually, I missed something. You have both the root ("/") version and the "/home" version being indexed, but the root version is cached as your other site. This could indicate that Google is connecting them. This is the cache of CollegeXpress, and it's the Careers and Colleges page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:w8YxyZPf5cgJ:www.collegexpress.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

I thought I had ruled this issue out, but apparently not. I'm not clear if Google thinks they're duplicated (which I'm not really seeing to be the case) or if there are some weird redirects or cross-linking causing the problem. I've seen this happen once or twice, but usually when sites were heavily duplicated.

[GeorgeLaRochelle]

Do I have to worry about putting a rel canonical between two pages that are not that similar?  Our members home page has a lot more links to content and the "Home" page basically has the CTA for registration.

[GeorgeLaRochelle]

I see it now,  collegexpress.com is 301ed to http://www.collegexpress.com/?ref=collegexpress.com.  I will have to change that to get red of the ?ref=collegexpress.com.

Good call on the brand name as well.  Since it is semi unique it shouldnt take much.

[Dr-Pete]

Can't tell why it's happening, but run CollegeXpress through this header checker:

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

You should see a 301-redirect to an odd referrer code. It might be only happening to crawlers or it could be for new visitors (I think I saw it once, but then couldn't replicate it).

If you can update the old links, even though there are only a few of them, that should help. Since it's a unique brand name, even a handful of links with exact anchor text could be boosting the wrong site quite a bit.

[GeorgeLaRochelle]

Thanks for the input Peter,  we have some very old links out there that we are in the process of reaching out to.  We are trying to get everyone to change the links to point at the correct site.

Can you explain a little more about the 301 to ref=collegexpress.com?  I dont see that or think that I have that setup anywhere.  I am still pretty new to SEO as this was dumped on me in January.

The weakening of CollegeXpress and the existing strength of careersandcolleges really does look like what is happening here.

All of your answers really make sense and I appreciate the time you took to answer.  Thank you very much.

George

[Dr-Pete]

I agree with Phil that I'd canonical that home-page - I don't think it's the whole problem, but parameter blocking in GWT is inconsistent, in my experience. For something that important, I'd want a stronger signal. I'm also not clear on why your doing a 301-redirect to ref=collegexpress.com when a crawler hits the site - it just seems like an unnecessary step that could weaken your home-page.

Although careersandcolleges.com isn't targeting "collegexpress" on-page, you do seem to be using it in inbound anchor text. For example:

http://home.epix.net/~captclint/schools.html

This sets up conflicting cues for Google, and since the Careers and Colleges domain is a bit stronger, it could be enough to cause you some problems. I'd make sure that brand anchor text is isolated, as much as possible.

In some rare cases we'll see Google canonicalize two domains, if they think the content is too similar. I'm not seeing any evidence of that here, though. Both domains are ranking, so that suggests that either the Collegexpress domain is being weakened somehow or Collegesandcareers is overpowering it.

[bioworld]

"For #3 we recently added the URL parameter ref in Webmaster Tools to crawl the representative URL and ref= should have no effect."

It's still good practice to use rel canonical in case incoming links from other domains get counted for a single page rather than one for each of the following:

• http://www.example.com
• http://example.com
• http://www.example.com/index.html
• http://example.com/index.html

"For #2 /home is really a Member's landing page.  It isnt what we want to display since there arent any CTA for registration."

If you want all search's to go to the true homepage, you could also put a rel canonical tag on the member's landing page telling search engines to send all link juice (PageRank) to the true homepage. The downside is that the member's landing page will not be included in search results.

Other websites just user scripts or redirects that change the when a user is logged in or not. For example, twitter, SEOmoz...

[GeorgeLaRochelle]

Thanks Phillip.

For #3 we recently added the URL parameter ref in Webmaster Tools to crawl the representative URL and ref= should have no effect.  I also noticed that we didnt have www.collegexpress.com in our sitemap at the same time.  I added it and resubmitted it to be crawled.  It has not yet been indexed.

For #2 /home is really a Member's landing page.  It isnt what we want to display since there arent any CTA for registration.  How else can I tell Google that www.collegexpress.com is the place we want to use as our home page.

[bioworld]

It looks like the link juice for your collegexpress site is being spread. Here is what i see in the SERP:

#2 - http://www.collegexpress.com/home

#3 - http://<cite>www.collegexpress.com/?ref=logo</cite>

Number 3 can be fixed to a root domain by using rel="canonical" tags

As for number 2, Google thinks that is a more relevant place to send users for "collegexpress", so maybe you should make that the homepage.