Secondary Domain Outranking Master Website
-
IEEE is a large professional association dedicated to serving engineers. The IEEE Web Presence is made up of flagship sites like IEEE.org, IEEEXplore, and IEEE Spectrum, mid-tier sites like Computer.org, and smaller sites like those dedicated to specific conferences.
It is unclear exactly when this started - but searches in Google for [ieee] currently return ieeeusa.org before ieee.org. This is troublesome, as users are typically looking for IEEE.org with such a general query. ieeeusa.org is a site that has a much narrower focus - it is dedicated to public policy.
IEEE.org is one of the strongest domains - I am thinking that this is a glitch of some sort. I am removing a stale sitemap that is referenced in robots.txt (though again, I'm not seeing any issues with other pages - its just two queries that are trouble: [ieee] and [about ieee]. And its noticeable in analytics
http://ieee.d.pr/hMg0/YhklCw7Z
What do you think?
-
Hi Thomas,
As Vahe said, searching from outside of the US is bringing up the .org site first, so I agree that this is probably a geolocation issue. The .org has many times more backlinks than the US site. It's essentially a glitch, but one Google has probably done with the best of intentions, meaning to show US content to a US audience. Is the US site geotargeted to the United States in Webmaster Tools? Unless the site has some rankings that you are very concerned not to lose, try removing that geotargeting for now and monitor results for about four weeks.
-
Thomas,
I reckon this is just a geo personalisation factor and not an issue with site authority or optimisation. What I mean by this is, is that because you are based in the US and the IEEE US website is more strongly associated with a US audience, then Google is likely to rank the US domain first.
When I do a Google US search I see the exact same "issue" issue you are having - https://www.google.com/search?q=ieee&gl=us&pws=0
But I don't see this issue here when searching from Australia - https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ieee&pws=0. In fact the US domain doesn't appear at all on the first page.
To have the IEEE domain outranking over the US, there are two on-page elements you could potentially focus on:
1. Content - IEEE USA has a alot more content implicitly targeting "IEEE" on the homepage. Providing overview content about the organisation, can probably help with providing context and initial value to users to define a brief org background and how they can use the site.
2. Cannonicalisation - Cross link between all IEEE owned websites (maybe in the footer) to provide signals to Google that these sites all essentially sit under the IEEE brand. And because the IEEE.org site is the most authoritative, there is a higher likeliehood of the site outranking the other.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Vahe
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
-
If I am getting links on competitor websites, is it safe to assume those competitors are doing this to hurt our SEO?
We have received a few notification from Google Webmaster Tools and Moz that our competitors have "mentioned" our page on their website. This is incredibly odd as you wouldn't think they'd want to do this. Further, when I go to the page that we are supposedly mentioned on, the link to our site is not on the page. What is going on? Thank you in advance for your insights!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | brits0 -
Domain change after over optimisation
Hi Guys, Wanted to get some second opinions. I have a client who worked with someone on their SEO for about 15months, during which time they reaped the benefits of being top of Googles organic rankings for their main keyword. Unfortunately, the link building that was completed was terrible with no care taken for future updates, over optimised anchor text links on totally irrelevant websites. Contacting webmasters in order for links to be taken down was an impossible task, these websites were pure spam sites which I doubt anyone oversees with any care. So went the disavow route, it caused a slight increase, but the way Google indexes the website and its pages is still all over the place. We have a good new content marketing plan in place for the next 12 months, and already have some great in depth articles, videos and interactive infographics created, but the problem is my client really needs some quick wins and cannot risk the domain never recovering fully from the issues. They own the .com version of the .co.uk they have so my thoughts at this point are to move them to the .com, and the new content strategy can be worked on as if its a new project. For the keywords they target there are sites on the 1st and 2nd page with DA of 16-18, so it wont take long with the new content we have to get them back to a level playing field with the competition. The one worry I do have is Google seeing the .co.uk go down, and the .com appear with the same website on and looking down on the "start from scratch" method.... does anyone know of any examples when they have acted on this? We started an AdWords account (very small spend) and this has been going to the .co.uk, if we start a new one, with same billing info going to the .com could that also cause problems? So basically, because of my clients situation, and the level the competition is it, moving to the .com seems like the best move, its just whether there is any risk involved. I've never read of there being any, but thought I'd get some opinions before comitting to it. By the way, I'm only seeing this as a feasible option as they can still keep branded traffic due to buying both domains at the same time. Thanks in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | gamnaking10 -
Is linking out to different websites with the same C-Block IP bad for SEO?
Many SEOs state that getting (too many) links from the same C-Block IP is bad practice and should be avoided. Is this also applicable if one website links out to different websites with the same C-Block IP? Thus, website A, B and C (on the same server) link to website D (different server) could be seen as spam but is this the same when website D links to website A, B and C?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TT_Vakantiehuizen0 -
301 domain name URL variants for canonicalization question in htaccess?
#1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xyz.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.xyz.com/$1 [L,R=301] What I want to do here is to redirect URLs that have omitted the “www.” prefix to the full “www.xyz.com” home page URL. That means the home page URL http://xyz.com will not resolve on its own, but instead will redirect to http://www.xyz.com (without trailing slash). #2 RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*(default|index).(html|php|htm)\ HTTP/ [NC] RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)(default|main|index).(html|php|htm)$ http://www.xyz.com/$1 [L,R=301] What I want to do here is to ensure that any home page URL that includes several versions of explicit page name references, such as default.htm or index.html, will be redirected to the canonical home page URL, http://www.xyz.com (without trailing slash). Are the rewrite rules correct? Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Low quality websites with spammy EMDs still ranking higher than genuine websites?
Hey guys, I've just been doing some searching and couldn't quite contemplate how heavily low-quality and spammy EMDs are still running some Google searches. Just take "cheap kitchens", for instance. Here are a list of URLs that appeared; http://kitchenunitsdoors.co.uk/ http://www.kitchenunits9.co.uk/ http://www.aboutkitchenunits.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchenunits1.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchensonline.com/ http://www.buycheapkitchens.com/ http://www.cheapkitchenscheapkitchen.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchensforsale1.co.uk/ http://cheapkitchensaberdeen.co.uk/ http://www.kitchensderby1.co.uk/ http://www.cheapcheapkitchens.co.uk/ http://kitchen-cheap.co.uk/ http://www.cheapestkitchensinbritain.co.uk/ http://www.cheapkitchenss.co.uk/ http://www.cheaperthanmfi.com/ http://cheapkitchenuk.co.uk/ As you can see, none of them appear to be genuine retailers and are setup purely to influence Google rankings. I'm amazed that Google is still giving so much weight to these types of sites - especially considering how search is meant to be better than it ever was before! Any insights into why this is?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Website "A Record" in DNS - Geotargetting
Hi, Our online shop is hosted with a French IP address. It is available in English and Spanish. I have noticed, as to be expected, that we get quite a few french visitors, probably related to our IP address Google must think its geo related. We don't want to particularly target any specific country, but more so english and spanish speakers. Can you have various A records around the world to help with this? Any suggestions or things I could look into?? thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Spammy Links (from .ru) pointing to my domain! How to deal with it?
Hi all, We run an e-commerce store - I am just looking at the apache logs and I am finding a lot of spammy links that have been referrers to our pages - when I check the links, I cannot find our URL in an HREF on their page so I presume they may be using some country based cloaking? These are the domains that are targeting specific pages on our site:
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs2010
http://3xru.ru/
http://saldoconsult.ru/
http://euro-casino.ru/casino/
http://delaymoney.maroderi.ru/
http://intimhot.ru/ How to deal with this? Our site is about cookware and they seem to be pointing these links to very specific products and categories. Never seen anything like this before, help would be appreciated. Thanks, B0 -
New website :301 redirection of a established domain
Hello , I am launching a new website which would host user generated content . Based on my brandname i have purchased a new domain . In order to improve SEO rankings i was considering to purchase a good quality domain (have gr8 link backs) and then perform 301 redirection of the domain to the new brandname.co.in domain . Does this work ? Is there any harm in doing this ? . Does the Link juice pass naturally ? Warm Rgd
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShoutOut0