Is there a way to let Google know our brand

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Hi, our company name is trophycentral, but many companies are linking to us as trophy central (with a space in betwen trophy and central).  We are seeing this in many links and I have a feeling that google is penalizing us for it (since we used to be on page one for trophies and tophy and now off the charts).  Is there a way to let Google know this, maybe some sort of tag?  Thanks!

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Joshua, thanks for taking so much time to respond.  To answer your questions:

1. yes, I am  using google webmaster tools.  I also confirmed there were no manual actions agianst us.

2. noticed the drop in March.  Most of our site is fine, but the drop was about 25-30% of our traffic that we were getting from a couple of keywords that disappeared completely.  That's why I am pretty sure it is Penquin related - both the timing and the fact that the words didn't move down, but rather disappeared.  However, I have had several people look and they can't find anything that looked "fishy".

Thanks for all of the suggestions.  I will take another look at the title tags - I thought I had most between 35 and 70 characters now.  I know we have an issue with the thin descriptions - we have many products that are very similar (ex. 500 award certificates that are all the same except for the title and image and it is hard to write flowery content that is different for all 500!  Same for our trophies!). I will also look at adding the branding to the titles.

Penguin is really killing us and I am just hoping something works!  Thanks again!

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Jamie, thanks very much.  I am ranking #1 for TrophyCentral, but dropped off the charts for trophies (we had been on page 1 for many years), so we are pretty sure it is a penguin issue, but we have not been able to figure out what's causing the problem.  We have no manual actions against us.

I have been reluctant to change the home page focus too much since I thought the home page was the most "powerful" and trophies are a big focus item for us.  I also noticed our competitors have a similar setup (ex. crownawards is #1).

I hear what you are saying though, so maybe I will reduce the focus to a different variation and more focus (like trophy | trophies and awards | from TrophyCentral) and then change the trophies page to be just focused on trophies.

Would this make sense?  Thanks!

[JoshGill27]

The fact that folks link to you with a space in between and without and other variations is a good thing. That doesn't affect how Google views your brand. In fact it helps you cause it allows you to have a link profile that looks natural with lots of variations around the term trophy etc.

If you search for your brand name with spaces or without you can see that Google clearly recognizes your brand since they show your site first and with a decent set of sitelinks below your homepage link in the SERPS. If they didn't "understand" your brand name they wouldn't do that.

One thing that could help is that on each of your pages of the site I noticed you don't use your brand name on the page title. It is common to do something like this: " Sports Medals and Awards - Trophy Central" While that isn't the greatest title ever it is there to quickly illustrate that on nearly every URL if you have your branding in the title at the end or beginning whichever is best for you, that gives another signal to the engines as to what your brand is.

In looking at a sampling of 500 URL's for your site only 5 of them come close to meeting the standard length of 70 characters or so that Google shows in the serps. It is a tedious job, but handcrafting non keyword stuffed titles can help greatly in influencing what people are clicking on when your site shows in Google.

As for not showing for search queries that is a bit puzzling. I looked at your backlink profiles and didn't see any glaring problems there. I looked at the code on your site and while very bloated it wasn't anything un crawlable. You have 25,300 pages indexed in Google. That appears to be quite a bit especially since you have just over 7,000 pages listed in your .XML Sitemap, so you may have some duplicate content issues to resolve and your URL's are not very clean but again not a glaring reason to be not showing at all. I notice you have Google Webmaster Tools code on the site, have you received any notifications from them recently? Have you logged into GWT to check things out there?

Your product descriptions are quite thin as well. Which overall isn't good but again probably wouldn't have affected rankings overnight. When did you first notice the drop? I would fix as much as you can on the site like page titles, urls, dup content and give Google a little bit of time to see those changes and that should help. Hopefully someone else on here can take a look and offer some more advise about why the drop might have happened. 1st blush looks like a number of things all piling up and the penguin update might have pushed you down. Take care.

[trophycentraltrophiesandawards]

Thanks, Raymond!  Sounds like some easy things I can try!  Much appreciated!

[jenmcardle]

For your ranking concern, there could be many factors involved and without a lot more details we cannot be sure the issue is related to the brand name at all.

About the brand name, the first recommendation would be to dedicate your home page to the brand. Your current title is "Trophies | Plaques |Trophies and Awards | Medals | TrophyCentral". You are targeting 5 keywords which is a very bad move from a SEO point of view. If that was my site the home page title might be "TrophyCentral".

Not only are you targeting too many keywords with your page title, you are also cannibalizing your own site as you have other pages focused on trophies and other keywords.

Raymond shared some good advice. You can further establish your brand on your home page by focusing on it.

[rayvensoft]

Not sure if it will help, but if your business has a physical address you can try registering it with google places (and other well known online business directories).  This can take time as they mail verification to your address, but it would be worth it.

You may also try to get your name trademarked in the country you are in.  That would help give you business more legitimacy in the eyes of google.

And finally try to get some of your back links to be labeled with the full business name, so something like 'trophy centrall LLC' or whatever applies to you.   That may also help.

Good luck.