The SEO Battleground from addmustard analyses the winners and losers of organic visibility each week. This week’s issue has a theme of brand conflict, with Google seeing confusion with big international sites such as AOL and Microsoft.
Winners:
With hotmail.co.uk temporarily redirecting to Microsoft’s Live email service, the Hotmail domain sees another massive boost in visibility week on week. It’s likely that the historic strength of the Hotmail.co.uk domain is keeping it in top positions with Google reading the temporary redirect as a signal that this site may return.
Another reappearing contender in this week’s battleground, huffington post have recently started ranking for terms varying around ‘weather’. With BBC South East’s Weather Presenter, Rachel Mackley fainting live on air last week, Huffington Post were quick to pick up on the story. Due to the strength of the domain, huffingtonpost.co.uk rapidly began ranking for ‘bbc’ and ‘weather’ related terms.
Aol is currently experiencing brand conflict in Google’s search results with its .com and .co.uk results competing for core brand terms. An IP detection script redirects the user to the relevant side of the site based on their location but it’s apparent that this method is out of favour with Google.
Losers:
North East news site, Chronicle Live gained strong visibility for an article published regarding Cheryl Fernandez-Versini’s apparent divorce. This article has since expired and been replaced in Google’s SERPs by the usual front runners for celebrity news and Chronicle Live sees a large drop in visibility.
We’ve seen this site make consistent appearances in our battleground, Office365 also featured as one of the week’s losers last week. The reasoning seems to be the same as before, confusion over Microsoft offering new email packages with outlook. The domain dropping out this week for broad terms such as ‘sign in’ and ‘email’.
Microsoftonline.com
This domain has also dropped out for branded email related terms such as ‘hotmail sign in’ and ‘msn sign in’. The temporary redirects Microsoft has in place for these domains are certainly causing confusion with Google and brand conflict is occurring regularly.
