Domain Name

[FusionMediaLimited]

Hello everyone

Please advice what to do in a situation when searching for a domain: www.domain.com google is recommending domain.org ? when these are completely 2 different sites? Does it has to do with trust rank?

Please advice.

[ChrisAshton]

Assuming you're just searching for "www.domain.com" and not using any operators (e.g. site:www.domain.com),  then there are quite a few things that could cause this.

The two most likely possibilities:

• The site is currently blocking crawlers via robots.txt; search engines are not allowed to crawl your site meaning it can't be indexed
• It has been penalised for some reason. There are so many ways to end up in a penalty, algorithmic or manual.

[FusionMediaLimited]

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the quick response.

When you do:

site: domain.com there is no problem

when you search for domain.com + keyword on the site as well, no problem.

but when you search for domain.com google recommends domain.org

and when you search for the word "domain" the site is no where to be found even though there is no strong competition. so it's really strange

[ChrisAshton]

hmm, that's very strange. You may be right that's it's simply a trust factor here then, though the .org site would have been to considerably stronger than the .com to rank higher for your own TLD!

I've seen this plenty of times with brand names being outranked but not domains. Perhaps an SEO revision is a good place to start and compare this against the .org?

[MoosaHemani]

This sounds like a trust factor to me. When you search for a query and another very similar query is very common in the search data, Google suggest the common query instead of your exact query. I am not sure what kind of domain you are fighting for but if you get more links or somehow you can manage people to search your brand more, I think this can be eliminated.

I guess!