Can't find mycompanyname.com in search for mycompanyname

Comments from others experiencing this problem

[bnhall]

Hi - I wanted to make a single thread to discuss the recent issue of mycompanyname not appearing in SERPs for searches on mycompanyname.

In my case mycompanyname is a single word, which I invented. The only references to it online are links to my site. For the last couple years, when I search for mycompanyname, I was always #1, and then all the folks who link to me are refenced below.

Since Allegra, mycompanyname.com is not in the SERPs at all for a search on mycompanyname. I also don't appear in searches on directory.google.com, although you can SEE mycompanyname.com listed in the directory! What on earth!

Some facts:
- My PR recently went from 6 to 3 as of Allegra.
- for the last month I had a 301 redirect on / to route it to /cityname/
- if I search: mycompanyname site:mycompanyname.com I get a couple hundred hits, which is right
- if I search: allinurl:mycompanyname I see something really weird: first SERP is someone that links to me, 2nd SERP is blank (yes, blank - there's a 1 inch space!), then I get a couple more SERPs, then my /cityname page appears

Something is really weird here....

Comments anyone else?

[diddlydazz]

You've just got to love this:

query for ourcompanyname (3 unique words - not general)

1st: scraper with link to ourcompanyname.com - redirects to a competitor.
2nd: IBL to our companyname.com
3rd: scraper with link to ourcompanyname.com
4th: hidden text (100's of phrases) no occurences of ourcompanyname visible.
5th: Google Directory page with link to ourcompanyname.com
6th: IBL to our companyname.com
7th: scraper with link to ourcompanyname.com
8th: ourcompanyname.com
9th: IBL to our companyname.com
10th: IBL to our companyname.com

so google thinks that a spammy scraper page is more important than not only the site it links to, but EVEN it's own directory lol

get it sorted google, i mean how long do u think it will be until a reporter notices these strange results?

if not that then the huge differences on LIVE data centers for the same query may get someone's attention.

i don't think silence is the best policy, if google are working on sorting out what is obviously a problem then they should at least give a hint to the fact, instead of just sitting back and ignoring us.

i will give it some time before i start promoting other SEs in the same way i have always promoted google, but my patience is wearing thin.

i give google exposure to around 1,000's of ppl a day on the site in the example above alone, may not be a lot, but when i change the site-wide search box from google it will be 1,000's of recommendations they miss out on daily.

silence is not the best policy IMHO

dazz

<edit> specifics removed SHKB </edit>

[sailorjwd]

I emailed Google last week about not being able to find companyname.com except for WAY down in the search listings. Explained to them my duplicate contents problem (mentioned in another thread).

I was surprised to get a somewhat non-canned reply today indicating my site was neither banned or penalized.

Interesting though to go from 4000 Google uniques/day to 800 (most of those are adwords clickers) on Feb 2.

Anyone else get a response from Google?

[bnhall]

I didn't

[BillyS]

I have not gotten a response yet.

[KrisVal]

I was surprised to get a somewhat non-canned reply today indicating my site was neither banned or penalized

Got the same thing in a caned letter, but with emphasis that these are not a penalty. I think if it were a penalty, home page cache would be gone and/or supplemental results would be shown. I just think that this was a by product of the Algo Update and possibly not intended on such a wide scale.

I have to believe they will be fixing this, but my guess is that they will wait until they really have the bugs ironed out before rolling out the code. There was so much outrage about this at the beginning of the month, I am sure they are concerned about public relations and don't want to seem like they don't know what they are doing.

[BigUns]

diddlydazz:

Have you done a allintext: query on your 3 'unique' words? I am seeing a direct correlation for some sites where allinanchor and allinurl are high, but allintext is inexplicably low (on some DCs), as are the resultant google rankings.

[walkman]

"I was surprised to get a somewhat non-canned reply today indicating my site was neither banned or penalized."

semi-canned ;)

Google is broken and you're not alone.

[BigUns]

diddlydazz:

oops; forgot to mention allintitle: can also be high; but a 'nonsense' result for allintext for some pages seems to greatly affect the resulting google SERPs.

[KrisVal]

Assume my domain is keywordkeyword.com

Hardly anyone would search on those two keywords combined without a space in between if they were not looking for a specific domain? Couldn't Google make some assumptions that the person is actually looking for a domain when they don't include a space and it is an exact match? I really think this would lead to a better user experience.

Example:
user search for my site enters: keywordkeyword
user searching for information enters: keyword keyword

I have heard from a lot of people with this issue that they have a keyword in their domain.

There is an argument that keyword.com is not the best result for the search so I will also propose that Google could ad "Did you mean keyword.com? like they use for spelling mistakes.

[bnhall]

Interesting.
If I search: allintext:myuniquecompanyname
I get almost the same results as if I search: myuniquecompanyname

[BigUns]

Hello KrisVal - Your example of Keyword1Keyword2 is interesting - Google deals with concatenation of words in sometimes complex ways. With respect to keyword.com, try a search on a single word in a competitive arena, for example a search query on hawaii. I don't know what SERPS google serves up to you, most likely similar to what I see. There is much to be learned from those top results - TLDs, Google operators results, etc.

[Unca_Tim]

I got hit with the missing "mycompanyname" search.

Since the beginning of Feb, G's been making dozens of daily strange visits on my site:

66.249.65.12 - - [19/Feb/2005:00:00:33 -0800] "GET /&y=02DEB59A8814CD58&i=322&c=6131&q=02%5ESSHPM%5BL7owflv%7Cv~q%3Fhzvxwk%3Fspll%3Fompxm~r6&e=utf-8&r=16&d=&n=8AL45H69GK1K0V24&s=0&t=&m=400388E8&x=0113B439B4EC09F1 HTTP/1.1" 302 230 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Anybody know what this is?

[mabour]

I cant find my web site in Google SERP, I 've tried to find it in allinurl and find.
I find this
[word1-word2%20word3.com...]

What does %20 means in my site URL?

[gpmgroup]

%20 = space , space = chr32 , 32 = 20 in Hex

[mabour]

But why Google indexed my web site with space?

//www.word1-word2%20word3.com/

The original URL is looks like
//www.word1-word2-word3.com/

[BriGuy20]

I just put up a blog and within a day or two, it comes up first for the search term.

Maybe you need some textlinks on your company subpages with your company name (leading back to your homepage)?

[MHes]

>But why Google indexed my web site with space?

Has someone linked to you with spaces in the url rather than -?

Does the link work?

[mabour]

No one.

Wronk link does not work.

[Chicago]

Seems to me that there must be some unintended consequences of a new duplicate content filter. We are part of the collateral damage too.

[twebdonny]

At this point after many emails to G, I am gonna just
wait a bit and see what happs with the next update. Which I hope will be sooner, rather than later. I do believe
based on the responses I have had from G and Adwords that they have been receiving mucho email, and that they are aware something is amiss. Keep writing! It is having
an impression.

[walkman]

"Seems to me that there must be some unintended consequences of a new duplicate content filter. We are part of the collateral damage too. "

this is weird. Clean as whistle acording to copyscape here (unless you count a sentence). 4+ hours a day entering /changing information on my site and I'm nowhere to be found. This is weird.

[BigUns]

Here's another possible reason why Allegra has gone awry for so many people. If you have a listing in the ODP, try this in Google (for website www.MyUniqueName.com):

allintitle:MyUniqueName

You will (hopefully) see yourself plus all the ODP "clones" that use MyUniqueName in their page title. Typically, Google labels these as supplemental results, so no big deal. One (or more) of them, however, may not be labeled supplemental. The site I'm referring to is a randomized version of the ODP, has node in the url, uses the ODP Title and meta description as the Title of their web page and then uses it again in a H1 Header, etc. Several Thousand of these pages are cached in Google, apparently passing through their filter and perhaps (speculation) even being viewed by Google as the "real" website while yours is discarded into the wilderness. This is apparently a Russian website hosted in USA by godaddy; their obvious purpose is to fool searchers into navigating to their 'directory' and be exposed to copious links to drug sites.

[xrtza]

I found something very interesting but not sure what it means if anything. First of all searching for my distinct company name on google without safesearch filtering yeilds 21,500 results. Of course my site is nowhere to be found even though 16,500 are listed using site: command. Nothing new but when using safesearch filtered results yeild 299 results. Visiting last page I choose to show supplemental results. I found my homepage on page 22 of results. BUT the title and description is from feb 2004 when site was born ie the infamous under contruction first page ever title and description! When clicking the cached link I see the the page is freshly cached on Feb 22 2005. So how could a page cached yesterday have a year old title and description? Using the site: command returns correct title and description. What does this mean? Are they ranking sites/pages based on old data? This would explain much in my opinion and points to a bug in google rather than a filter, penalty etc? Could this also be related to the infamous 1969 cache date I have seem for many so called supplemental results? Could any or all of the resent fubar update aka allegra issues be date related? I would be curious if any other MIA sites can find similar results by checking results in the deep dark supplemental index.
more info.
Even with safesearch off (no filtering) I find outdated title and description when using text from outdated description as search string. This confirms in my mind the ranking of my site is based on year old data even though cache is fresh. If anyone wants to confirm this I will gladly provide search string etc.

[billythekiddo]

I am having the same problem for 1 of my websites since about 6 weeks. If you search for mysite.com, it gets listed at page 5 of the search results. I am trying everything to understand what the problem could be. How on earth is it possible? I wrote google an email and got a response back. They redirected me to a page with information about webpage optimalization.

In my links on my site I mostly use /page.asp so wthout the domain. Could this be the problem?

Another strange thing: index.asp is the main page and only gets a pagerank of 1. If I enter index.htm or index.html, these pages, that never existed I get a PR of 3! But if I do a check for the domain: domain.com (so without the page) I still get a pagerank of 3.

[Jalinder]

I just tried a search for seo on google. Most results are not readable ... its showing squares. Anyting to do with my language settings? I have set English in preferences already.

[xrtza]

The title and description being shown for homepage matches what would have been expected one year ago. Using the internet archive wayback machine web.archive.org I see an exact match for what google is displaying for "real" "organic" "keyword" searches. using webmaster type commands like site: etc. shows a current title and description corresponding to actual page cache. However since site seems to be invisible it has been very difficult to even find anything in search results other than webmaster type commands. Anyone have any advice? If it is unique to my site what should I do? Write Google? I would like to get feedback from other webmasters with MIA sites and maybe sandbox victims. Check the wayback machine then search on the text you would expect to be displayed by google in results for the old archive of your homepage. Misery loves company so I hope I am not the only one with this issue. Advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[g1smd]

>> But why Google indexed my web site with space? <<

Is the space in the URL behind the clickable link in the Title?

Or, is it just in the Green Text on the bottom line of your entry?

If it is just the Green Text then the gap is simply so that the long URL wraps on screen if there are adverts on the right-hand side of the SERPs.

[mabour]

It is in allinurl:
There is not Green text
I just tried to see where is my site in SERP here
[mcdar.net...]

[g1smd]

I mean the green text URL on Googles results page.
Every result has the URL in green in the result.

[bears5122]

This seems to be more of a problem with filtering out paid links more than anything. What they did in my opinion was place a flag that would go up if a site received too high of a percent of links from the same term. Basically a way of stopping link buying for major keywords.

However, this adversly hurts those who get links under their business name. I'm guessing they will find a way to fix this, then again, Google isn't really putting much effort into search these days. It's a very sloppy algo at the moment and seems Google out thinking themselves again.