Google inaccurate results: Common or error?
-
Hi all,
While searching for our primary keyword, I can see 2 websites on second page results which are non-related to the keyword or industry but their company name is this keyword. Like if I want to rank and searching for "SEO", there are 2 websites which called "seo trucks" and "seo paints". I wonder how Google is ranking these websites for high competition keyword with 1 million searches per month. So the keyword in URL and this keyword mentioned across the website being their brand name taking over the other potential ranking factors like backlinks, relevant content, user clicks, etc.....
Thanks
-
Google is incredibly good at entity detection (i.e. figuring out when someone is searching for a "thing"). When there is a canonical right answer for that thing (e.g. the company website in the case of a company), it will often rank very well despite not necessarily having any of the "traditional" ranking factors in place.
Typically, when the search is unambiguously for the thing in question, the company will rank #1 even if there are much stronger websites and pages about that company. You will rarely find that a company is outranked on their own company name when it's sufficiently distinguished from other entities even if it's a really small company and there are (for example) major media stories about it.
There are a variety of other factors - like query sequences (e.g. a user searching [seo] followed by [seo trucks] in your example) that Google can use to associate more specific sites with more general queries as well.
Most importantly - I'm not sure there's a great deal you can do about it, not any general lessons you can apply to your own attempts in this market / keyword space - so I wouldn't spend too long worrying about it!
-
Thanks for the response Micheal. These 2 websites have very less traffic compared to the other websites which are trying to rank for the keyword. I have noticed that 10% of the traffic to these websites comes with search of that keyword. So, is that the only factor influencing a boost in rankings? Usually there is a lot of content about this keyword on many other websites; even though these 2 websites which are just got the keyword as their company name. Do u think the keyword in their domain name is major reason?
-
So, why do you consider the result inaccurate? If they are coming up that close to the top then perhaps a number of people are using that keyword to search specifically for those businesses. Google believes that their content is good, and, that you may have been looking for them, albeit with them on the 2nd page Google hedged its bets that you were not.
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
-
How long does google take to re-ranking pages in results?
I mean when google dance, the pages in results go up and down frequency every minue, but finally your page will rank in any position in google, what is the time when you get another position in google
Algorithm Updates | | engtamous0 -
Fetch as Google - removes start words from Meta Title ?? Help!
Hi all, I'm experiencing some strange behaviour with Google Webmaster Tools. I noticed that some of our pages from our ecom site were missing start keywords - I created a template for meta titles that uses Manufacturer - Ref Number - Product Name - Online Shop; all trimmed under 65 chars just in case. To give you an idea, an example meta title looks like:
Algorithm Updates | | bjs2010
Weber 522053 - Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online Shop The strange behaviour is if I do a "Fetch as Google" in GWT, no problem - I can see it pulls the variables and it's ok. So I click submit to index. Then I do a google site:URL search, to see what it has indexed, and I see the meta description has changed (so I know it's working), but the meta title has been cut so it looks like this:
Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online Shop So I am confused - why would Google cut off some words at start of meta title? Even after the Fetch as Googlebot looks perfectly ok? I should point out that this method works perfect on our other pages, which are many hundreds - but it's not working on some pages for some weird reason.... Any ideas?0 -
Why are Google Webmaster Tools' Google rankings different to actual Google rankings?
Dear Moz, We have noticed that according to Google Webmaster Tools one of our client sites is ranking very prominently for some of the major key phrases that we are trying to rank them for. However, when we perform a Google search for these queries, our client's content is nowhere to be seen, not even on the 5th page (we logged out of the Google account before performing the test). A long-term manual spam action on our client's site was recently lifted by Google - is it possible that Google Webmaster Tools is providing data about our client's estimated Google rankings, without taking into consideration the penalty of the manual spam action which was taken? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | BoomDialogue690 -
Google Unable to Access Robots.txt
We haven't made any changes to the robots.txt file and suddenly Google claims they can no longer access the file. The site has been up and active for well over a year now. What are my next steps? I have included a screenshot of the top half of the file. See anything wrong? D3H5tgE.png
Algorithm Updates | | rhoadesjohn0 -
How Do I Make My Google SERP "SiteLinks" more relevant?
I have a shopping website with thousands of products, and the sitelinks that google has chosen for me (for a long time) are random product pages, which makes no sense to me. I do not emphasize those products on the home page, and I have a sitemap that clearly lists the directory of all the categories. I also added a "nofollow" attribute to almost every link on the home page that is not important. These products in the site links seem completely random and there isnt even a sitelink for "about" or any of the footer content! What gives? Also, my sitelinks never updated to the new, better version. Any suggestions?
Algorithm Updates | | cDNAInteractive0 -
When Google crawls and indexes a new page does it show up immediately in Google search - "site;"?
We made changes to a site, including the addition of a new page and corresponding link/text changes to existing pages. The changes are not yet showing up in the Google index (“site:”/cache), but, approximately 24 hours after making the changes, The SERP's for this site jumped up. We obtained a new back link about a couple of weeks ago, but it is not yet showing up in OSE, Webmaster Tools, or other tools. Just wondering if you think the Google SERP changes run ahead of what they actually show us in site: or cache updates. Has Google made a significant SERP “adjustment” recently? Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | richpalpine0 -
How do I get the expanded results in a Google search?
I notice for certain site (ex: mint.com) that when I search, the top result has a very detailed view with options to click to different subsections of the site. However for my site, even though we're consistently the top result for our branded terms, the result is still only a single line item. How do I adjust this?
Algorithm Updates | | syount1 -
Difference in which pages Google is ranking?
Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages. In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages. I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own. Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise. Anyone else noticing similar changes?
Algorithm Updates | | BedeFahey1