Secondary Domain Outranking Master Website

[thegrif329]

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?

[JaneCopland]

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.

[Vahe.Arabian]

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