When you think of Firefox, do you think of a browser?

[hoosteeno]

I do. Firefox is a browser.

Mozilla's website is quite authoritative and gets a lot of traffic. Firefox is a browser and has been for a very long time. What might be preventing en-US content about Firefox from appearing in en-US search for "browser"?

https://www.google.com/search?q=browser&lr=lang_en&pws=0

Results for that search includes such things as...

• The Blackboard browser checker utility page:https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Student/Getting_Started/Browser_Support/Browser_Checker
• The Ensembl genome browser page:http://grch37.ensembl.org/index.html
• Dozens of pages for things that aren't browsers but just happen to use the word "browser" in their URL or content
• Pages for any number of web browsers, including almost every web browser you can imagine except Firefox

If you force results in other languages, Firefox shows up (it was #7 in Danish SERP when I typed this):

https://www.google.com/search?q=browser&pws=0&lr=lang_da

If you do a site-specific search, plenty of Firefox pages rank:

https://www.google.com/search?lr=lang_en&pws=0&q=browser+site%3Amozilla.org

The en-US site continues to rank well for all sorts of other unbranded terms that include the word "browser" -- it's in the top 5 for "private browser" and "fast browser".

The attached image shows what "browser" searches that produced en-US results looks like in webmaster tools. There are dots where the site appears in the top 20 (which is probably its appropriate ranking) and then it immediately disappears. There are short lines where a new page on the site starts to rank for "browser" (as in the case ofFirefox Focus), and then those disappear too.

Is the en-US Firefox site being penalized for some reason on this keyword? Does anyone see some obvious misconfiguration causing it to fall out of rankings?

Thanks.

wE0Bn

[KeriMorgret]

In an incognito search, Google doesn't show up in the first page of search results (on Google) for search engine, either.

[hoosteeno]

It would be odd for Google to invest in ranking high in Google searches for "search engine" and I wouldn't be surprised if they actively suppress that result because -- well -- people searching on Google have already found Google's search engine. But Google does land on the first page of Bing results for "search engine".

In any event, I'm not sure how this relates to my question. Can you help me understand? For example, do you think Google -- who most would agree are a fairly important search engine -- are trying to rank high on Google searches for "search engine" and discovering that for unknown reasons, they can't even get into the top 15 pages of results for it? That is what I am asking about, except it's Firefox and "browser".

Firefox is second for "browser" on Bing. It's been a browser for twice as long as Chrome has existed. It is at least as well optimized for the keyword "browser" as, say, a random GitHub project on the 14th page of "browser" results. And yet, it doesn't rank. I'm looking for ideas why.

For what it's worth, unlike Firefox, Google may not need to invest in search rank for, say, their browser. Anyone who visits Google Search (or any other Google tool) in a non-Chrome browser is apt to get an advertisement at the very top of the page, outside and above all search results, encouraging them to use Chrome. You don't need a lot of SEO when you own the SE.