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Barnes591

: Years after news site changed name, Google is appending the old name to search titles and news stories Anchorage Daily News was purchased by Alaska Dispatch News a couple of years ago and we've

@Barnes591

Posted in: #GoogleSearch #Seo

Anchorage Daily News was purchased by Alaska Dispatch News a couple of years ago and we've since completely changed our site and infrastructure. However Google Search (and Bing) keeps displaying Anchorage Daily News in the top stories cards when you search for things such as 'Alaska News'. It also keeps mis-representing some of our section pages, and appends - Anchorage Daily News to the end of the search result. See the screenshots for examples.

It should say Alaska Dispatch News and seems really inconsistent with the results, sometimes displaying both on the same carousel.





Neither our articles, section pages, or other pages have any mention of Anchorage Daily News in the meta data. Our meta data should be all setup properly, utilizing opengraph, ld+json and proper HTML for stuff like the title, description, etc.

Here are some examples:
www.adn.com/alaska-news/mat-su/2017/02/21/the-family-of-a-mat-su-teen-wanted-him-home-instead-they-say-he-died-at-a-flop-house/ www.adn.com/section/alaska-news/
Our site name is correct in the Google Webmaster tools, and the Google News publisher panel. It's almost as if some external source is telling the search engine that Anchorage Daily News still owns these pages, but I can't figure out what it is. One of the more recent changes I've made is I've added NOODP to the robots meta tag to prevent it from getting data from DMOZ and requested Google re-crawls the site but it hasn't done so yet. Is there anything else I could be missing?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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@Eichhorn148

I just ran across some micro-data markup that Google says will help:


Customized site features

You can customize how your website appears in Search results by using three kinds of structured data markup.

...

Site name— indicate the preferred name for your site in Search results

You can also provide more than one possible name for your site, and let Google Search algorithms choose between them. Use this to provide natural sounding alternatives for your [site], such as “Google” rather than “Google, Inc.”


Google has more information about the markup as well as code samples here: developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/sitename
It looks like you would have to markup your site name at least on your home page. It would probably make sense to mark it up on every page of your site.

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@Looi9037786

To summarize the comments and maybe give a bit more insights:
There is a sum of difference influences, which could move Google to such misunderstanding. The main influencers are:


Any kind of Wikipedia, specially other languages. To make sure, that all Wiki sites are talking about the same, you should manually (or through site-search) audit them. My first try was successful - german wiki doesn't know about Alaska Dispatch, but it knows bout Anchorage Daily: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorage_Daily_News Any kind of address aggregators, like yelp, bbb and the like
Any kind of other structured data sources, like freebase, wikidata, dbpedia
Any kind of Google owned databases, like Google my Business, Google Plus
Link anchors from third party sites. You should know: adn.com has much more link anchors "Anchorage News Daily" (3K referring domains), than "Alaska Dispatch News" (2,2K referring domains)
Many image captions on adn.com are build up from author name + "Anchorage News Daily", like Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News. On this page, www.adn.com/tag/pebble/, this kind of usage is in 12 cases, in noscript area, which is much better accessible for the bot.
This kind of Google query would be helpful too, to localize places, where instead of Alaska Dispatch is Ancorage News on use: www.google.de/search?num=100&q=%22Anchorage+Daily+News%22+-%22Alaska+Dispatch+News%22+-site%3Aadn.com

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