Questions created by hoosteeno
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When you think of Firefox, do you think of a browser?
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
On-Page Optimization | | hoosteeno0 -
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Google suddenly indexing 1,000 fewer pages. Why?
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
How important is it to rank for a product category?
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.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
Domain: Product brand or company brand?
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?
Branding | | hoosteeno0 -
Best way to give away rank?
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?
On-Page Optimization | | hoosteeno0