Problem ranking page with a double name and an "&"

[ajgar]

I have a client with a double name and a & like: Jones & Jones.  I and using all in one SEO on a Wordpress site.  Their home page is not ranking even though I have Jones, Jones & Jones and Jones and Jones listed in the keywords. Interestingly enough other pages where I did not list the home page rank when you do a serach for "Jones & Jones" I have not had this issue with other sites but have never had a name repeated and and & in between... any advice woild be appreciate.. I just signed up for a trial of MOZ...

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Alan. Welcome! I hope you get a lot out of your trial. As for the Jones & Jones problem, it could look like keyword stuffing to the search engines and thus the page may appear over optimized when it's meta keywords tag is, "Jones, Jones & Jones..." Etc. Imagine if a search engine saw the same behavior for a different word. It'd look like a spam attempt.

I would go through the site and minimize the business name mentions to something that reads naturally, delete the meta keywords tag (if anything it's a negative signal if not otherwise completely ignored by the search engines) and then submit Jones & Jones to a large number of business listing websites--local and otherwise--to solidly register the company as being named Jones & Jones. Cheers!

[Linda-Vassily]

When you say you have Jones, Jones & Jones and Jones and Jones listed in the keywords, what do you mean? In a keywords meta tag? That is not used by Google anymore. When you say "other pages where I did not list the home page", do you mean you do not use a keyword tag?

Neither a double name nor an ampersand should be a problem, though there might be a lot of competition for a common name. You could try the Moz keyword tool to see how difficult your term is to rank for.

[EricaMcGillivray]

Both Ryan and Linda have great answers for your specific issue.

As a new customer, I highly suggest signing up for our webinars that walk you through how to use the tools and real life examples with them.