My site can't be found because of "showing results for" feature

[Technel]

Hello!

My domain is the composite of two normal words, like "widgetplace.com" (hypothetical). From a branding perspective, it is important that it be written as "Widgetplace" (one word).

I've been doing this all along, but if you search Google for "widgetplace", I'm literally not in the results... at all. It took me a minute to realize why:

When a user searches for "widgetplace", "Showing results for 'widget place'. Search instead of 'widgetplace' [link]?" appears.

I'm the top result when you click that link, and I'm first on Bing and Yahoo. But for a casual searcher on Google, I don't exist! Any thoughts on what I can do? Rebranding as "Widget Place" is theoretically possible, but I cannot imagine competing for those generic keywords...

Please help! Thanks!

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:04 am (utc) on Jan 4, 2012]
[edit reason] further examplified - examples were owned [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

You're in a chicken and egg situation here. Google's got phrase occurrence statistics and searcher statistics that suggest that the two words... "widget" and "place"... are overwhelmingly predominant, and that your brand name, "Widgetplace", isn't occurring on a statistically noticeable number of pages and/or searches.

The correction feature is something that Google feels is beneficial to most users... and until you can build up enough brand awareness on the web, statistically Google will be right (at least with regard to the Google algorithm). I'd stick with the brand name you like, and take steps to build up awareness via social media and whatever legitimate online marketing efforts you can muster. Trusted links with your brand name are important. This is going to be necessary to establish brand identity in any event.

If you think the correction "feature" is annoying now, you should have seen it in its early days, shortly after the Caffeine infrastructure went live. Here's a discussion of an early variant of spelling correction, which was built into the Autocomplete Suggestion tool in the search box....

A Red "Did you mean: ____" Shows in Google Drop Down Suggestion
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4178034.htm [webmasterworld.com]

The discussion covers some example searches for entitiies which, like your brand, were initially rejected by Google, but over not too long a time became recognized when there was sufficient usage and search volume.

Spelling correction is an artifact of phrase-based indexing, discussed in at least one of the basic phrase-based indexing patents. A similar mechanism, I feel, also relates to branding. In both, it appears that familiarity, usage, and prominence can help create acceptance.

Here's also a reference link to the Official Google Blog announcement of the spelling correction feature....

Spelling Corrections in Suggest
[googleblog.blogspot.com...]

[Planet13]

I guess it would just be wishful thinking then to register the name widget-place.com and hope that google would interpret the hyphen as a space, and thus put widget-place.com at the top of the SERPs...

[johnhh]

I guess it would just be wishful thinking

Not just wishful thinking, I have seen it done in similar circumstances for a three word phrase.

[Technel]

Thank you for the replies! I'm going to try registering widget-place.com and set up a 301 redirect to widgetplace.com.

[ken_b]

How old is the site/domain?

My domain is w1w2w3

Search that all as one word or break it up as w1w2 w3 or w1 w2 w3 and I'm still number 1.

But the site is 11+ years old and that might be why.

In the beginning you had to search the exact w1w2w3 to get me at #1.

Along the way there was a long period in the middle years where if you broke up the domain you'd get the "Did you mean....?" thing.

Haven't seen that now for a long time.

Do you have many inbound link using the exact domain name (www.w1w2.tld)" as anchor text? Or even w1w2 as anchor text? I have a ton of inbound links like that, I suppose that might help.

I've seen a lot of what you are talking about lately though. Often even if you search for the exact domain including the www & tld.

Search for www.example.com and get did you mean www.example.com?

Always seems odd.

[lucy24]

I guess it would just be wishful thinking then to register the name widget-place.com and hope that google would interpret the hyphen as a space, and thus put widget-place.com at the top of the SERPs...

There's a recent thread that actually addresses this question. The original discussion was whether lowlines or hyphens are better, leading to a from-the-horse's-mouth quotation from Big Name Google Guy.

I think this is what I was trying to remember:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Cutts recommended hyphens [over lowlines] because it is more likely to return a result even if a specific phrase was searched for.

[Robert Charlton]

I'm going to try registering widget-place.com and set up a 301 redirect to widgetplace.com.

I'd be careful. This kind of redirect is an approach which could backfire on you for a variety of reasons. It's certainly fuzzing the objectives as stated in the opening post.

First, to clarify... if I owned widgetplace.com and it was an important brand to me, yes, I would register widget-place.com if I could, and I probably would 301 it to the main domain, depending on other objectives. But I'd do this as brand protection, not as a hidden redirect that I wanted to use for playing games with Google.

For this kind of redirect to have any ranking effect, it needs to have been promoted first. There's nothing to be gained just by the keywords in the hyphenated domain name itself, since once they're 301ed they no longer exist. IMO, the anchor text benefit of a redirected domain comes from the redirected link juice flowing through the anchor text of the links that remain behind on the web, not from the domain name itself.

Promoting a domain and then redirecting it, though, is something that I know Google frowns on. It's manipulative, definitely sneaky, and more easily detected than you might suppose. This discussion of about six months ago certainly suggests that Google has the capability to easily spot the redirect...

Domain name replaced in SERPS with alias domain name
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4327200.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Also, if you control the source links, why not just link to your branded domain in the first place? Why go through the whole charade of putting up a domain, linking to it, and then redirecting it?

Beyond that, what are the objectives?...

My domain is the composite of two normal words, like "widgetplace.com" (hypothetical). From a branding perspective, it is important that it be written as "Widgetplace" (one word)....

...Rebranding as "Widget Place" is theoretically possible, but I cannot imagine competing for those generic keywords...

Do you want the brand name to rank as a composite word?... or do you want to rank for the two-word keyword phrase?... or do you really want to do both but don't think you can?

As I read it, the point of the original post is that Google wasn't returning the two words joined together in the brandname. Again, that's because, in Google's database, that was a much rarer combination than the two words separated. Why then emphasize the two words separated?

ken_b's suggestion that inbound links are necessary bears some repeating here...

Do you have many inbound link using the exact domain name (www.w1w2.tld)" as anchor text? Or even w1w2 as anchor text? I have a ton of inbound links like that, I suppose that might help.

lucy24 - Underscores aren't allowed in domain names, so there's really no choice between hyphens and underscores in the matter. As for hyphenated domains, I haven't seen those discussed as an SEO technique, with or without a redirect, in a long time.

[Technel]

How old is the site/domain?

Not very old (6 months, but mostly inactive until very recently). As Robert said, that's the problem (chicken & the egg scenario). It's really hard to promote offline when people can't just search for the name and click on the first result. A surprising number of people use the search bar interchangeably with the address bar (or type it in without a domain name).

Do you have many inbound link using the exact domain name (www.w1w2.tld)" as anchor text? Or even w1w2 as anchor text? I have a ton of inbound links like that, I suppose that might help.

Nope. That's what I'm trying to build. Specifically:

<a href="http://www.widgetplace.com">widgetplace</a>

Do you want the brand name to rank as a composite word?... or do you want to rank for the two-word keyword phrase?... or do you really want to do both but don't think you can?

Yep, I only care about the composited brand name ranking. I don't want to promote widget-place.com only to have it auto-redirect to widgetplace.com, though. I guess I will have to focus on inbound links with "widgetplace" as the anchor text and hope Google's algorithm drops the "Showing results for" response.

I did set up widget-place.com as a 301 to widgetplace.com, though. I don't intend on promoting it (i.e. I suppose it's worthless from an SEO standpoint, then).

[buckworks]

It's not useful for SEO, but it IS useful for brand protection.

[lucy24]

Yeah, it wasn't a perfect analogy. But the point was that a hyphen is treated a word separator, so searching for "green foobar" will get you green-foobar.com but not greenfoobar.com.* (This is counterintuitive to me, because the ubiquitous php forums treat the hyphen as a word character in searches, but what can you do.)


* Yes, that was a deliberate attempt to not say "blue widgets".