search engine expert needed
posted 2004.07.07
I've run across something to do with search engines that, despite my experience, has stumped me a little, so I'm putting a call out here for anyone who might be able to help me shed a little light on the subject.
In this scenario, we have Company A, the retailer, and Company B, the affiliate of said retailer. Company B has an affiliate link to the home page of Company A.
When you search for Company A's name via Google, the very first result is Company A... problem is, the URL is Company B's link, rather than the root URL. Which, as you might imagine, is making Company A furious - since they'd have to pay commission to Company B for all sales which came through the search engines.
Now, both Company A and Company B assure me they have no idea how this happened, and Company B assures me that they didn't submit the affiliate URL to Google.
So, how to explain how this happened?
Here's my best guess: despite Company A spending a huge chunk of cash on online advertising and paid search engine placements, they didn't think to submit their root URL (for free) to Google. Hence, when Google spidered Company B's site, they found the link to Company A, which was the first time they'd encountered Company A's site.
So, given that it was Google's first exposure to this company's link, it got locked in somehow as the "main" URL for Company A.
Does this make sense? I had originally thought that perhaps it was simply due to popularity (Company B gets far more hits and cross-links than Company A) but search results should still default to Company A's root URL... unless Google doesn't know the root URL.
Make sense? Other ideas? I could really use some opinions here.
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It's hard to say without knowing more information... does Company B have the name of Company A contained within their site as often? Are there a number of affiliates or just the one?
If more people link to Company B than Company A and they have similar content then how is the google engine to know that Company A should come up number one? based on URL alone? I think the reason most company sites come up number one is because there's a greater likelihood that more people would link to the company than the affiliate.
This may be an odd situation that doesn't happen often. An example of this might be the 'nigritude ultramarine' SEO contest. The contest site itself isn't #1... it's the person with the most links that has come in at #1.
Google ranks links using over a hundred different algorithms, the best known of which is PageRank. This is based on in-bound links. Chances are company B's site has a higher PageRank, and so is being ranked better. The text used within links to the page itself can also make a difference.
The URL ended up in Google because it was spidered. Submitting links to Google is virtually pointless - Google most effectively and quickly picks up sites by following links. Getting the URL removed from Google will accomplish nothing, too, as it will just re-index it later. Company B could add a META tag to their page directing robots to ignore the page, but that's hardly in their best interests!
Company A should be ranked better for their own name. The way to fix that is to get more in-bound links from better sites, and to have those links use the company name as the link text. Submit the site to web directories like DMOZ. Make sure the page is well written (most importantly the title and the header tags).
Could it be someone else who signed up as an affiliate? It seems pretty simple that if you see in google via the URL that it is an affilate...you have your answer. Which affilate you cant really tell.
This is most likely a function of improper optimization; if company B uses the *name* of company A on the page and as the anchor text, then they are more likely to rank above A.
Submitting to Google is pretty useless, as Google will automatically find anything that has at least a link to it.
It sounds like it almost solely a case of link popularity - the affiliate url has the most power and the correct anchor text to make google think it's the most relevant.
Your best bet is probably to request having the listing removed, and then submit both URL’s again. Google says that whenever the Googlebot spiders a site it takes a month for any changes to show in the index, but I’m not so sure about that as I’ve come across listings to my site that should have, by those rules, been corrected months ago. That’s one of the drags about Google: definitive info is hard to come by. Good luck.