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My experience with competing for my own brand name against myself.... Bulwarkpest.com was the established authority and brand for Bulwark Exterminating and Bulwark Pest Control. Time had come for a major site overhaul. We revamped the site and decided to go with the longer domain, bulwarkpestcontrol.com. No matter how hard I tried I could not dethrone bulwarkpest.com. Traffic on bulwarkpestcontrol.com was 10x that of bulwarkpest.com. More links, better SEO, more pages, I even threw PPC into the mix. The only way I was able to beat my own domain was to 301 bulwarkpest.com to bulwarkpestcontrol.com. I took it back out of the 301 out of curiosity, but the new ranking domain, www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com, stayed on top. Once you have achieved that glorious position of "brand" or authority for a search, it is near impossible to dethrone it. Even if you were to beat the algorithm, if your site ever got a human evaluation, which google does do on a regular bases, you would be dethroned because searchers want to find the brand website when searching for a brand.

Thanks Keri!  I thought it might be something like that, so I'm glad you could confirm.

If you are able to use domains from 10 years ago with even say 10 back links I have seen them to work well in comparison to domains which are registered that day hehe But if you have a domain which is say 4 years old and it has 200 root domain links from quality sources, good content it will be better. But it is not just about the age of the domain it is more so about the age the domain has been in the index's.

Thanks again. I am not eager to push any single product at this point. We are planning on building some strategic landing pages over the next few months and I will create some links to those once they are created.

I'm not seeing it either. Maybe try clearing cache or go incognito. 6Jf5D.png

I haven't seen it anywhere naturally, but I agree that it will make it even more less likely for users to go to page 2 (out of those that did in the first place, that is). Since the page numbers are listed under the ads and not directly under the last organic result, those that are able to distinguish between paid and organic are likely to stop scrolling once they hit the ads. On the flip side, users would no longer have the ads on the side of the page which cuts out clutter while they are viewing organic results.

Something that I also look at when checking rankings for different keywords(the very competitive ones esp) is to look at when google last cached each of the top results - I've found that this can sometimes lead to changes in rankings since our page has not been crawled in a few days and the few above ours just got crawled. Just a thought

Yes that's my thoughts too. What's interesting is that they made a switch after a while.

No, not at all. It is a common practice for sites to set up geo-location where if a user is from the US the site would appear in English, and if the user is from France the site would appear in French, and so forth.

I doubt it Though, let's wait and see....

Does personalization does not come into picture when  viewing results in Ad Preview Tool ?

Thanks

Checking the URl's in google they do indeed seem to be tracking URL's, which must pass info back into their alogrithm.

Not to my knowledge. Google analytics seems to keep this as a search referral. You can find traffic from maps, but that is specific to maps.google.com Webmaster tools certainly tracks it as a search placement.

Hey Joe, I noticed the same thing (large drop in indexed number/percentage of pages) a few days ago and thought that was related to a ranking drop I have experienced.  All I did was resubmit all (tag, category, posts) sitemaps via GWT and the next day Google had almost 100% of my submitted URLs back in the index.  However, that didn't fix my apparent Google penalty issue so I'm still searching for a solution: http://www.seomoz.org/q/help-with-diagnosing-google-penalty Oh, this was with a wordpress site utilizing Yoast's WP SEO plugin to create XML sitemaps.

Definitely explains it! Thanks

I removed the "sensitive content" i think because of that it showed up.. for me also it shows up some times now but not always

<cite>www.google.co.uk/trends</cite> very useful for this type of thing

I'm using the Raven Tools app for iPad... although admittedly, you can get an almost identical experience by visiting the website in Safari.