Why I Don’t Rank For Zoe Piper
Ever since I became interested in these things, I’ve always ranked first for my own name. First it was my tutorial page at university, then when I came to work at 9xb my profile page took the top spot. A few months ago however, that all changed…
Someone who shares my name registered it as their domain and it shot to number one straight away. It’s remained there ever since, despite not containing any content whatsoever. My company profile on the other hand has loads of content about zoe piper, and I also write quite a lot of blog posts, all with my name on them and links back to my profile, not to mention my other web activity. The domain name in question has over a hundred links from the same blog - surely some of these links will be disregarded?
I know this is a bit of a personal crusade but I feel cheated. I’ve spent quite a long time building my own content on the internet, but am outranked - seemingly by default - by a simple domain name with nothing on it (I can’t emphasise that enough!). And this isn’t exactly a competitive market.
Today’s Moral
For all Google’s guidelines about content and links, it seems buying the right domain is still a huge factor in your rankings. Luckily I already have a website so it’s just a matter of principle, but for business owners it could be make-or-break.
6 Responses to “Why I Don’t Rank For Zoe Piper”
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I have noticed this more and more over the past year or so. Domain names and title tags seem to be more important than anything nowadays. This is not necessarily a good thing though, as keyword driven domain names have flooded the market.
Jim Sefton says:
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I’ve just registered garyhartley.co.uk, let’s see what happens
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Hi Zoe, There are some major reasons your not ranking. Your Meta tags say “”My Default Keywords”. Also your name appears once in your profile page and the other time it does it is an image so that doesn’t help. I bet if you added your full name to your profile some more times it would put you up in rankings. Also LinkedIn will has your name on one page over 50+ times so you need alot more usage to compete. But that is the way it goes. This is only a profile so I am sure you’re limited. Despite having loads of content linked to your profile, Google also wants to see the relevance of Zoe Piper on this page and is only seeing it once.
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Hi Atom, I should really check my meta tags - thought they’d populate by default tbh! It’s interesting with something like this to see how different factors are weighted, from URL to internal links to meta tags etc like you say. Unfortunately I can’t go overboard on my profile page, it has to be short and sweet so on-page content is pretty much a no-no! Ah well…if people want me they’ll find me. Thanks for the comment
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Hi! Zoe’s page has always been titled for ’Zoe Piper’ (check the Google index for the page) so I’m guessing it must have been a momentary database fail or something when you were looking Atom. I don’t think the ’use your name many times in the body’ advice is going to cut the mustard though. It used to work once upon a time, but if it were that easy (and I guess you’re hinting at keyword density here) then it would be *easy* to rank for anything and we’d all be millionaires The thrust of Zoe’s point is that http://www.zoepiper.com is a content free holding page, with no links and essentially of no value for anyone searching for ’Zoe Piper’. Google could show any other result from the first page of the SERPS at the top and it would be more relevant and useful…
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Hi Zoe, I see that your page http://www.9xb.com/zoe_piper dropped down in google results to the fifth place. Your description and keywords meta tags are empty. I suggest you to set them and check the result with http://www.metatagscheck.com
