4 replies to this topic

[Drew]

The company I work for sells web-based software for recruiters, hr sourcing and staffing companies. When we re-did our website several years back, we combined our corporate website and our software into a single domain. One of the components of our software is a job posting system, and the idea at the time was that we could appear to be a much larger website in the eyes of search engines if the thousands of job postings our clients put out on the web from our system showed up using our corporate domain name (prior to that time, our .com name was the company site, and the .net was the software servers).

We're now getting ready for a new version of the site and I'm revisiting the domain name issue and questioning whether that's still a good setup. Our actual company website with info about us and our products consists of fewer than 50 pages, but Google shows over 100,000 results for our domain name. This means that, as far as Google knows, the info about our products is only a miniscule piece of the content on our domain. If I look in the Webmaster Tools and check out the top content keywords and queries and inbound links, the vast majority of them are totally unrelated to our business... they're the names of our customers, or they're things like "apply online" or "career opportunities".

When I search for the primary phrases we want to appear for in Google, we do seem to come up just fine, so it doesn't seem to be hurting our organic results as far as I can tell... but I guess I'm wondering whether there's any unforseen harm in Google 'thinking' that our website is mostly about our clients' job openings rather than about our software.

Edited by Drew, 04 April 2012 - 02:30 PM.

[Jill]

but I guess I'm wondering whether there's any harm in Google 'thinking' that our website is mostly about job openings rather than about software.

Google doesn't "think." Don't worry about it. As you've already seen, they haven't pigeonholed you, nor will they since that's not how they work.

[Drew]

Whew. That's a relief! I know they don't "think", but they do have an algorhythm that "thinks" in a way. I guess I thought that the percentage of content in a domain about a given subject might indicate its relevance to that subject, but as long as we can still be the top result for something that's only mentioned on .0005% of our pages, we'll keep it as-is!

[chrishirst]

but they do have an algorhythm that "thinks" in a way.

not really, It doesn't 'think' it simply "scores" documents at a particular URL based on the words those documents contain, along with words used in links pointing to the particular URL.

Absolutely nothing more complicated than that. The complicated bit bit is how the scores are assigned to each particular factor.

[piskie]

Although the Algorithm itself doesn't think, it's decision making processes are a result of the coding engineers protracted 'Thinking Exercises' evolved over many years.