Why would a competitor brand appear in our meta? - (i've never seen this before)

[seo2017]

Why would competitor sweetwater appear in americanmusical.com meta?

For example, Google: site:americanmusical.com ext:pdf rebate

You will see this result:

PDF]Nord Stage 2 EX $500 Rebate Form - Sweetwater

<cite class="_Rm">https://www.americanmusical.com/ItemFiles/Rebate/NordStage2EX_05312017.pdf</cite>Your page is not mobile-friendly.May 31, 2017 - REBATE DETAILS: To receive your $500 rebate, send your completed form with a copy of your invoice or receipt and UPC codes to either the.

[TaylorRHawkins]

Hmm.... This is wacky.

It looks like although it says "Sweetwater" in the Title Tag, the pdf file is still being hosted on your URL (as well as the actual rebate form having American Music listed as the return address).

Maybe perhaps whoever added this rebate form to your website "borrowed" it from Sweetwater? And by that I mean, copied over the pdf file, changed the address, and copied everything else (Title Tag included), but forgot to take off the Sweetwater brand name?

Either way, it's on your own URL and it's a rebate form that includes your own address. Just get into your site editor and change the title tag and you should be fine.

[matt-elshaw]

Hello,

I would say this is a duplicate content issue.

Identical versions of the PDF are found on both the sweetwater.com domain and also americanmusical.com:

https://media.sweetwater.com/store/pdf/Nord_cashback_20170531.pdf
https://www.americanmusical.com/ItemFiles/Rebate/NordStage2EX_05312017.pdf

If you perform an "info:" search on your URL you will notice that Google returns the document from sweetwater.com:

info:https://www.americanmusical.com/ItemFiles/Rebate/NordStage2EX_05312017.pdf

[Dr-Pete]

I can't replicate this in live SERPs, but Matthew's explanation seems to match the evidence. It does appear that Google is doing some kind of implicit canonicalization. It's rare, but it does happen.

You could try giving the PDF a unique title in its own meta information (the document doesn't seem to have any). It's more likely to look like a duplicate if that's undefined.

The next step would be to recreate the PDF slightly and make it unique, but honestly, each step is going to get to be progressively more work. It really depends whether this is just an anomaly or it's causing you actual issues as a business.