Branded Searches -- Should I Name My Products Differently?
-
I know that branded searches are a large component of whether sites were hit by Panda or not, and I wonder if moving forward, I should always include the name of my site (domain) in the name of the product.
For example, if I have a product with a unique name such as 'history maps' should I change the name to include my brand name, i.e '[domain] history maps'? Or, if users search for the unique product name, is that sufficient?
-
While it's true that big brands get away with more than other sites, I think it's a lot more complex than that. Big brands also have massive link profiles and high authority, which cushions a lot of other problems. Some big brands actually were hit by Panda, although to varying degrees.
Driving brand searches alone isn't going to work for most sites. Google is taking more offline factors into account for what constitutes a brand, I'm willing to bet. They're also looking at overall volume, authority, social activity, etc. It's not going to be easy to make yourself look like a big brand online if you aren't in "real" life.
If you want to build your brand, that's fine, and I think it's certainly good to do things like use some branded terms in anchor text (just for diversity). It's also, of course, a business decision as much (or more) than an SEO one. There's value to brand-building. I just wouldn't treat it as a cure for SEO problems. There are plenty of easier and more effective ways to prevent algo-related issues. A lot of Panda comes down to content quality, aggressive advertising, and site architecture.
-
Basically, if you were a brand, you weren't really affected by Panda. There is quite a bit of discussion around 'branded searches' as a main indicator of whether a site is a brand or not.
For example, if you look in adwords keyword tool for searches around macy's, youll see people are looking for 'macys home' 'macy's boots,' 'macys furniture.'
-
Can you clarify what you mean regarding branded searches and Panda? I'm not aware of any Panda issues involving brand vs. non-brand searches.
-
I would love to know too. My thinking is that adding any non keyword related words to your title will decrease your % of accuracy towards the search query. So technically I think "history maps" is better than "'history maps [name]" for the search query "history maps". *Not sure though.
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 get google reviews on search results?
Hi, We have good google reviews. (4,8) Can we get this rating stars also on our organic search results ? Best remco
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | remcoz0 -
News Errors In Google Search Console
Years ago a site I'm working on was publishing news as one form of content on the site. Since then, has stopped publishing news, but still has a q&a forum, blogs, articles... all kinds of stuff. Now, it triggers "News Errors" in GWT under crawl errors. These errors are "Article disproportionately short" "Article fragmented" on some q&a forum pages "Article too long" on some longer q&a forum pages "No sentences found" Since there are thousands of these forum pages and it's problem seems to be a news critique, I'm wondering what I should do about it. It seems to be holding these non-news pages to a news standard: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en For instance, is there a way and would it be a good idea to get the hell out of Google News, since we don't publish news anymore? Would there be possible negatives worth considering? What's baffling is, these are not designated news urls. The ones we used to have were /news/title-of-the-story per... https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/2481373?hl=en&ref_topic=2481296 Or, does this really not matter and I should just blow it off as a problem. The weird thing is that we recently went from http to https and The Google News interface still has us as http and gives the option to add https, which I am reluctant to do sine we aren't really in the news business anymore. What do you think I should do? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Servers matter for different domains for same keywords?
We have 3 domains in the same industry, but unique content on each site. The whois info is private, but the domains are all under the same owner registrant info. In terms of rankings, does it matter if we move them all into the same RackSpace cloud account? Will Google know the relationship somehow and if they do, will they care?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Working to Start an Shopping Idea Site - Which Totally Based On Scraping product from Ecom. How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain.
How Quickly I should Add products and categories in this new domain. We are going to start its promotional by google adwords and facebook. I worrying about 10000's of product pages. kindly guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innovatebizz0 -
Should Site Search results be blocked from search engines?
What are the advantages & disadvantages of letting Google crawl site search results? We currently have them blocked via robots.txt, so I'm not sure if we're missing out on potential traffic. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
How to show country name in google search result
I have a site with tld .com but my target country is United kingdom so i want to show United Kingdom in SERPs.How can i show it ? I have already set target country United Kingdom in Webmaster tools but still it is not showing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
Strange issue with video search results...
Hi all, Got a bit of a weird problem that I can't work out. I've got a page that contains a video. The SERP for one keyword has the video appearing directly in the search listing like a video rich snippet / schema. Do not want. This rich snippet style video result only appears when the page is found for this one keyword, and no other. How do I stop google displaying the page like this? Why is it only displayed like this for one keyword and no others? The video is a YouTube video and is embedded in the page. Nothing fancy is going on with the code. Any ideas? I'm stumped.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WillQ0 -
Why do branded manufacturer websites have multiple pages for their products?
My favorite golf ball is the Srixon Tour Yellow ball. Srixon has a product detail page here (www.srixon.com) AND there's also a product detail page here at shop.srixon.com. Is there any sort of SEO penalty here because there's some duplication? Does the fact the store is a separate subdomain make this more allowable? Many branded manufacturer websites work this way but it just doesn't make sense to me to have two product pages that you have to manage content when you can have just 1 with a call to action. I also work for a branded manufacturer and am considering rebuilding our website from the ground up with the online store and the main/marketing website blended into one to eliminate this duplication. We have this same duplicated marketing/store setup as well. any feedback is greatly appreciated. Confused.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmmmy0