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
-
Favicon not showing in google serps
Hi, I have a website where the favicon is not showing in the google mobile serps. It's appearing the default icon instead (world icon). This is the tag I have place in the head section of the website: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" /> The size of the favicon is 48x48 and it's appearing correctly in the browser tag. I've checked that the google robot can crawl it and in the server logs I can see requests from the "Google Favicon" user-agent. Has anyone had this same problem? Any advice?
Technical SEO | | dMaLasp0 -
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 -
Which factors are effect on Google index?
Mywebsite have 455 URL submitedbut only 77 URLs are indexed. How can i improve more indexed URL?
Technical SEO | | magician0 -
Google Page speed
I get the following advice from Google page speed: Suggestions for this page The following resources have identical contents, but are served from different URLs. Serve these resources from a consistent URL to save 1 request(s) and 77.1KiB. http://www.irishnews.com/ http://www.irishnews.com/index.aspx I'm not sure how to fix this the default page is http://www.irishnews.com/index.aspx, anybody know what need to be done please advise. thanks
Technical SEO | | Liammcmullen0 -
Why is google ignoring my sitelinks demotions?
I'm referring to the sitelinks that appear in the SERPs when searching for my brand name. 6 subpages come up- some found in my main navigation, some not. 3 of the 6 sitelinks have been demoted in Webmaster Tools under "Site Configuration > Sitelinks." I realize that they say in their instructions: "Google doesn't guarantee that demoted URLs will never appear as a sitelink, but we do consider a demotion a strong hint that we'll try to honor when generating sitelinks." I am just surprised they would ignore 3 of the demotions and for so long. The pages that are demoted do not have very many internal links pointing to them (unlike other pages of my site that are targeted specifically). Also, the site has tens of thousands of pages to choose from. Why are they ignoring my request? What else can I do to fix this?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
How to tell google about the changes
Hello All this is my first question here. we have recently changed our website design and backend. so the problem now is in google it is showing the old url's and when ever a client come from google he is prasented with a 404 error page if this happenes many times. will google penalise our site ? if yes. how to prevent this from happen. waiting for some replies.. thanks
Technical SEO | | idreams1 -
Google Shopping Australia/Google Merchant Centre
So Google Shopping has finally landed in Australia so we've got some work todo hooking it up to our client ecom sites. Right now we have a handful of clients who are setup, the feed is getting in their ok but all products are sitting in "disapproved" status in the dashboard and clicking into each individual product the status says awaiting review. I logged a support ticket with Google to get some more info on this as it doesn't look right to me (ie the disapproved status in dashboard) and got a useless templated answer. Seems that if I switch the country destination to US the products are approved and live in google.com shopping search within the hour. Switch back to Australia and they go back to disapproved status. Anyone having the same issue/seen this before? I simply don't trust Google support and wondering if there's other factors at play here.
Technical SEO | | Brendo0 -
Google Website Optimizer
So if you are AB testing two pages: index.html and indexB.html Shouldn't I nofollow indexB.html? It has all the same content, just a different design.
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0