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
-
Ranking for a brand term with "&" (and) in the name?
Hello Moz community. We have a company that rebranded their name to "Bar & Cocoa" with the URL https://barandcocoa.com/. It's been about 3 months, and the website has yet to show up organically anywhere within the first 50 results foer their brand terms. It seems that Google pretty much ignores the "&" or "and" word when typing in bar & cocoa, or bar and cocoa in search. You'd think with that with the exact domain name, it would at least move the needle a bit, but it has not helped. Even being in Denver, I'm getting results for a "Bar Cocoa" business located in Charlotte, NC, and the secondary pages that belong to that business, and then a bunch of other companies, products and irrelevant search results (like a parked domain)! Any suggestions or ideas, please help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | flowsimple1 -
Google Rankings Are Dancing What To Do?
I was been ranking on page no.3 for many of my keywords. Suddenly they all dropped to Page No.9& Page no.10. Now 10 days back one of my keyword got back to page no.4 & now suddenly today it went back to page no.9 again. I haven't done any changes to the site. My page speed is less than 4secs. Checked everything & all seems fine. No errors or manual actions notification in Webmaster too. Should i wait for the rankings dance to get over or should i start doing something. Currently i am planning to get fresh pages with good content added to the website for the whole month of July. Suggest me what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Sub domain vs. sub folder
I know this has probably been asked many times and answered too, but things change a lot, so I would like to know with current search engine algos and co. The scenario is as follows: Building an ecommerce site and also want to incorporate a Q&A section, for support and FAQ's and such. should we go ahead and sub domain this like: community.test.com or rater go with test.com/community. I would really like to know why, why not and maybe some real life examples. Thank you all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s-s0 -
What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result
On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase. What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plumvoice0 -
Website No Longer Ranking In Google:
My website was on first page google couple of months ago, now nothing. Shows up in Bing page one. Some queries/pages still showing OK, but some not at all. Example "residential elevators illinois" found nowhere. http://www.accesselevator.net is the website. Have found 900 poor quality links and used disavow tool. Any further suggestions? Their Page Rank also went from a 3 to a 2. Implemented nofollow on all outgoing links. Need advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trailblazerzz90 -
How can Google index a page that it can't crawl completely?
I recently posted a question regarding a product page that appeared to have no content. [http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-is-ose-showing-now-data-for-this-url] What puzzles me is that this page got indexed anyway. Was it indexed based on Google knowing that there was once content on the page? Was it indexed based on the trust level of our root domain? What are your thoughts? I'm asking not only because I don't know the answer, but because I know the argument is going to be made that if Google indexed the page then it must have been crawlable...therefore we didn't really have a crawlability problem. Why Google index a page it can't crawl?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Blog content - what to do, and what to avoid in terms of links, when you're paying for blog content
Hi, I've just been looking at a restaurant site which is paying food writers to put food news and blogs on their website. I checked the backlink profile of the site and the various bloggers in question usually link from their blogs / company websites to the said restaurant to help promote any new blogs that appear on the restaurant site. That got me wondering about whether this might cause problems with Google. I guess they've been putting about one blog live per month for 2 years, from 12/13 bloggers who have been linking to their website. What would you advise?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0