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Hi!

Mozilla put together a tool to help test Chrome web extensions for compatibility with Firefox. I took the liberty of running the Mozbar extension through this tool, and there is only one issue to be resolved before the existing Chrome extension will run on Firefox. Check it out:

https://www.extensiontest.com/test/857d5700-a855-11e7-9c3d-35e0bb5262dd

app.runtime is not supported

found in the following locations:
        scripts/browser_button.js:46697
        scripts/content_page.js:60933

Just a couple changes and this will work on Firefox! Any chance we'll see it soon?

It would be odd for Google to invest in ranking high in Google searches for "search engine" and I wouldn't be surprised if they actively suppress that result because -- well -- people searching on Google have already found Google's search engine. But Google does land on the first page of Bing results for "search engine".

In any event, I'm not sure how this relates to my question. Can you help me understand? For example, do you think Google -- who most would agree are a fairly important search engine -- are trying to rank high on Google searches for "search engine" and discovering that for unknown reasons, they can't even get into the top 15 pages of results for it? That is what I am asking about, except it's Firefox and "browser".

Firefox is second for "browser" on Bing. It's been a browser for twice as long as Chrome has existed. It is at least as well optimized for the keyword "browser" as, say, a random GitHub project on the 14th page of "browser" results. And yet, it doesn't rank. I'm looking for ideas why.

For what it's worth, unlike Firefox, Google may not need to invest in search rank for, say, their browser. Anyone who visits Google Search (or any other Google tool) in a non-Chrome browser is apt to get an advertisement at the very top of the page, outside and above all search results, encouraging them to use Chrome. You don't need a lot of SEO when you own the SE.

I do. Firefox is a browser.

Mozilla's website is quite authoritative and gets a lot of traffic. Firefox is a browser and has been for a very long time. What might be preventing en-US content about Firefox from appearing in en-US search for "browser"?

https://www.google.com/search?q=browser&lr=lang_en&pws=0

Results for that search includes such things as...

• The Blackboard browser checker utility page:https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Student/Getting_Started/Browser_Support/Browser_Checker
• The Ensembl genome browser page:http://grch37.ensembl.org/index.html
• Dozens of pages for things that aren't browsers but just happen to use the word "browser" in their URL or content
• Pages for any number of web browsers, including almost every web browser you can imagine except Firefox

If you force results in other languages, Firefox shows up (it was #7 in Danish SERP when I typed this):

https://www.google.com/search?q=browser&pws=0&lr=lang_da

If you do a site-specific search, plenty of Firefox pages rank:

https://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&pws=0&q=browser+site%3Amozilla.org

The en-US site continues to rank well for all sorts of other unbranded terms that include the word "browser" -- it's in the top 5 for "private browser" and "fast browser".

The attached image shows what "browser" searches that produced en-US results looks like in webmaster tools. There are dots where the site appears in the top 20 (which is probably its appropriate ranking) and then it immediately disappears. There are short lines where a new page on the site starts to rank for "browser" (as in the case ofFirefox Focus), and then those disappear too.

Is the en-US Firefox site being penalized for some reason on this keyword? Does anyone see some obvious misconfiguration causing it to fall out of rankings?

Thanks.

wE0Bn

I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes.

The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course).

The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index.

Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category".

• If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category.
• If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.)

What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day.

wE0Bn

We have a site, blog.example.org, and another site, www.example.org.

The most visited pages on www.example.org were redesigned; the redesign landed May 8. I would expect this change to have some effect on organic rank and conversions. But what I see is surprising; I can't believe it's related, but I mention this just in case.

Between April 30 and May 7, Google stopped indexing roughly 1,000 pages on www.example.org, and roughly 3,000 pages on blog.example.org. In both cases the number of pages that fell out of the index represents appx. 15% of the overall number of pages.

What would cause Google to suddenly stop indexing thousands of pages on two different subdomains? I'm just looking for ideas to dig into; no suggestion would be too basic. FWIW, the site is localized into dozens of languages.

We make a product in a category of products -- let's say "donuts". There are really only 4 major donut companies (lots of artisanal donuts out there, but they're not really competitive yet). One of our competitors has systematically achieved top rank for "donut" and lots of adjacent keywords like "donuts" and "buy donuts".

My question is, does their success ranking for the product category keyword "donut" influence their success ranking for long-tail keywords like "powdered donuts" and "tastiest donuts"? Or, to flip that question, should we try to compete for "donut" before worrying about "decadent delicious donuts"?

Other factors:

• In terms of search volume, as you would expect, "donut" sees 10 to 1000 times as many searches as most of the other keywords adjacent to it.
• We can definitely compete for "donut" -- just trying to figure out if doing so should be our top priority.

I work for a company with a very strong brand. We have a product with an even stronger brand. Right now, our product marketing pages look like this:

https://www.company.com/product/....

I believe this leads to URL bloat, and I think we're probably missing some search rank on product-branded keywords that we would automatically get if, instead, our product marketing was here:

https://www.product.com/....

An example of this structure is Colgate Palmolive (http://www.colgatepalmolive.com/en/us/corp), the makers of Colgate toothpaste (http://www.colgate.com/en/us/oc/).

We already own both domains, but of course right now SEO rank is entirely owned by company.com.

If we put product marketing at product.com, of course the company site can still link to the product site anywhere, and vice-versa, which means (I think) that both domains help each other out. But we wouldn't have to spend as much time worrying about the branded keyword in product content.

I have found some posted opinion that tends to support my hunch here, but I haven't seen anything more concrete in support of it. Has anyone got direct experience with this question?

We have a set of branded and unbranded keywords that we want our product site to rank very high for. Right now, our support site owns the first page of rankings for most of the keywords we care about. What is the most efficient way to give the rank currently enjoyed by our support site to our product site? Both have very high domain authority and tons of backlinks. Here are some factors that might apply:

• Support site has lots of copy including these keywords, while product site doesn't (yet)
• Support site doesn't currently include a lot of links to the product site (and vice versa)
• They're on the same domain -- support is at support.domain.com, product is on www.domain.com
• Support site has many more pages and their URLs are more semantically related to keywords

I know there are lots of structural improvements implied by the above -- on the product site, increase the amount of copy (and landing pages) focused on keywords and significantly improve internal links, etc. But I'm wondering if the fact we control both sites gives us any options we wouldn't have in a competitive situation?

Near as I can tell, the biggest technical blocker to porting the Chrome WebExtension to Firefox will disappear in Firefox 53[0], which lands in the general release channel on 2017-04-18[1]. In other words, now is a good time to start porting, since it can be tested in nightly today.

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1330100

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar