Why won't my sub-domain blog rank for my brand name in Google?
-
For six months or so, my team and I have been trying to get our blog to rank on page one in Google for the term "Instabill." The URL, http://blog.instabill.com, is a sub-domain of our company website and they both use the same IP address. Three pages on our www.Instabill.com site rank in the top three spots when searching our brand name in Google. However, our blog ranks 100+.
For our blog, we are currently using b2evolution and nginx.
We have tried adding static content on the home page, static content in the sidebar, static content on an About Instabill page, and optimizing blog posts for the keyword Instabill, but nothing seems to work.
We appreciate any advice you can provide to us.
Thank you!
Meghan -
By the way, has the blog ever ranked for instabill?
-
Not knowing how much traffic the blog gets or how much of that converts to new business, you might try experimenting with some things.
If you're thinking of moving the site, you might first see if your problem is domain related by just copying and rel=canonicalizing the whole blog to the new domain and seeing if it eventually shows up for "instabill", while keeping the original in place. If it does, you can then put in your 301s and eventually delete it. If it doesn't then it's likely architecture or content related. Personally I think it's content related.
If the new domain doesn't rank for instabill, delete the blog software on the new domain and remove the rel=canonicals to it from the old domain, throw up a wordpress blog, and put a couple of posts on it with a link from your website's homepage and see if that works.
-
We are now considering changing the url from blog.instabill.com to something like instabillblog.com. I have following concerns about the change;
- Will changing the domain really be that helpful (i.e. will the change get our blog on page one for the term instabill)
- We have over 350 pages of content on our blog. Will changing the domain have possible negative effects ( I was thinking of using url updater in webmaster tools and creating a permanent 301 redirect from the older url to the new)
- Having never changed a url for a site with this much content and seo value for my company I would like to know the following from someone who has made mistakes here before;
- what not to do
- what steps you would take to make the transition easier
Any help here will be greatly appreciated.
cheers,
-
We still cannot get our blog to rank on page 1 for the term Instabill. Thank you all for your previous input, but I am marking this question as answered.
-
Don't control your own anchor text - you'll get yourself into trouble.
-
Don't mention it : )
You may also want to look at anchor text for your links pointing from instabill.com to blog.instabill.com. It would probably be better to use "Instabill Blog" vs. just "blog" and even better might be simply "Instabill", if you could get away with it.
-
Again, I appreciate your feedback, but it is a technique we have tried in the past.
Originally, we were not optimizing the Instabill Blog for the keyword Instabill and it was ranking poorly. We found resources that encouraged us to use our company name more, so we added static content, an about page, and blog posts with Instabill in the title and heading tags.
For a short amount of time, our blog fluctuated between pages one and two for our brand name. Now, although our technique has not changed (and we even update our static content regularly), our blog does not rank at all for our brand name.
We will keep what you have said in mind, but it has failed us in the past. Oh, and thank you for your helpfulness within your snide remark.
Cheers!
Meghan -
Funny.
While you're twittling your thumbs waiting for some actual traffic, keep what I said in mind.
-
Thanks for your comment. I dont feel your feedback has any scientific value. We are still waiting for an answer.
-
I see "instabill" used 58 times on the default page and a whole bunch of blog posts about Instabill. Google's seen this before and as I recall, they came up with a couple algorithm tweaks in order to push website owners to make real websites with information that real people might possibly want to read. Try doing what everybody else has to do--tone down the heavy handed SEO and invest in copy that's focused on a specific audience, not on you.
-
Hey Meghan,
Any particular reason you 301 http://blog.instabill.com to **http://blog.instabill.com/index.php
?
http://blog.instabill.com** has more authority and backlinks. You should 301 http://blog.instabill.com/index.php to http://blog.instabill.com instead and see if that helps.
-
That was one of our theories, but we wanted to research additional possibilities before deciding the real reason for the poor ranking. Thanks!
-
Google decided that your main site represents your company.
Type "instabill blog" and you rank for people searching for your blog.
Same with my site.
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
-
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
A client rebranded a few years ago and doesn't want to be associated with it's old brand name. He wishes not to appear when the old brand is searched in Google, is there something we can do?
The problem is there was redirection between the old branded site and the new one, and now when you type in the name of the old brand, the new one comes up. I have desperately tried to convince this client there is nothing we can do about it, dozens of news articles crop up with the two brands together as this was a hot topic a few years ago, but just in case I missed something I thought I'd ask the community of experts here on Moz. An example for this would be Tyco Healthcare that became covidien in 2007. When you type tyco healthcare, covidien crops up here and there. Any ideas? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netsociety0 -
WordPress posts Title field inserts title into blog posts like a headline but doesn't ad H1 tag how to change?
I have a Wordpress website which is just using the Default theme, when I post in the blog, whatever I put in the "Title" field at the top of the editor is automatically is placed within the body of the blog post, like a headline, but it doesn't include any H1 tags that I can see. If I add my own headline within in the blog editor, it still inserts the Title like a headline. I am using the Yoast SEO Plugin and also write the meta title there, should I just leave the Wordpress title field blank so it doesn't insert into the blog post? Or is that inserted Title being recognized as an H1 even though I don't see h1 tags anywhere? Hope this isn't too confusing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO4leagalPA1 -
Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP
Good morning, This is my first post. I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com). On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday. If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab0 -
Huge Google Dance For Some Rankings. What Gives?
I've got a relatively new website (launched at the beginning of June 2013). For some keywords I'm targeting, it first ranked around page 15. It made huge jumps to finally rank on page 2 or 3. Since then, it goes back to page 15 and then back to page 3. It does this every now and then. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
Do onpage likes and shares affect Google ranking?
Hi All, I know that social bookmarks are considered to be a good thing when pointing to a specific page. Is that the same to simple facebook "Likes" and tweets? By Likes I mean on page and not on Facebook fan page. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
How do Google Site Search pages rank
We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines. So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword, and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links. However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton610