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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.

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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:

https://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/

https://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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    This appears to come from the knowledge graph. Not much you can do except to make sure the site is right and all of the information you presented to G is correct. Check Google My Business, Google+, and any other accounts you have to make sure all the NAP (name address and phone number) is correct and consistent. As far as crawling, that can take a while except that you are a news site. Make sure you have schema.org mark-up on the About or Contact page and optionally in the header or footer of each page. Knowledge graph stuff does not update quickly. You may be waiting a while. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Commented Feb 23, 2017 at 16:17
  • @closetnoc It has been this way for some time now, but as far as I can tell everything has also been updated for some time now (Almost a year). Is there no way to find out what has the dated info?
    – James Ives
    Commented Feb 23, 2017 at 16:31
  • The knowledge graph gets it's information from a variety of sources that are all chosen for high trust value and to corroborate data found. One of these is Wikipedia which offers it's content as a ontology and Google takes as is. Is there a Wikipedia page? Check DMOZ and other trusted sources. NOODP may not help in this case since this is knowledge graph stuff and not necessarily from the website itself.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Feb 23, 2017 at 16:38
  • You will notice that your example has both Daily and DIspatch. I did a quick poke around and all seems right. I did a search for Anchorage Daily News and found quite a few places where the old name is still used. Not sure what the effect of this is, however, you may be able to contact some of these and get the sites updated. For example, HuffPo, offers.com, CrunchBase, etc. That may help. This is a Googleism. There may be little you can do other than what you have done and correcting any sites that exist and waiting.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Feb 23, 2017 at 16:58
  • I was going to say, if everything you can do is updated such as directories, social media,on site information then look at your back link profile. You can use Majestic or ahrefs for this and see the anchor text being used.
    – GrapeSoda
    Commented Feb 27, 2017 at 1:03

2 Answers 2

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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:

  1. 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: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorage_Daily_News
  2. Any kind of address aggregators, like yelp, bbb and the like
  3. Any kind of other structured data sources, like freebase, wikidata, dbpedia
  4. Any kind of Google owned databases, like Google my Business, Google Plus
  5. 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)
  6. Many image captions on adn.com are build up from author name + "Anchorage News Daily", like Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News. On this page, https://www.adn.com/tag/pebble/, this kind of usage is in 12 cases, in noscript area, which is much better accessible for the bot.
  7. This kind of Google query would be helpful too, to localize places, where instead of Alaska Dispatch is Ancorage News on use: https://www.google.de/search?num=100&q=%22Anchorage+Daily+News%22+-%22Alaska+Dispatch+News%22+-site%3Aadn.com
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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: https://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.


(source: google.com)

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