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I have reviewed this: How to remove "Did You Mean:" from Google Search? but it does not answer my question. The suggested fixes in this question is to set up FB, IG, and other social media pages. We have had these for months. We have 576 Instagram followers, 293 followers on Facebook, 17,425 views on Vimeo, Youtube, Pinterest and LinkedIn presence. Here is the response in a YouTube search:

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Let's be clear. If you search for my company name and product name YT changes the spelling to something that doesn't exist and suggests a video with no matching result terms (using either spelling) disparaging OTHER luxury handbags, while insinuating it is referring to my handbags.

When a user searches for our business, Aslaen Vaugn, Google and Youtube changes the spelling to Aslan Vaughn and displays these results:

enter image description here

For the first few months it just seemed like it was taking some time to percolate, but over 7 months we have had 17,500 unique visitors and nearly 90 backlinks.

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The only results for Aslan Vaugn is the birth announcement of the second child of a musician in New Jersey. It is a Facebook post and has 14 likes. Google is favoring a spelling that has only two results with 14+ views over dozens of links and tens of thousands of views.

How is this possible? An FB post with 14 likes is that much more popular than a business with 17,500 unique visitors (despite the Google obfuscation)? Is my company on some list? On other search engines my company covers the first few pages in results. Through Google, you cannot find our company no matter how many pages in you go. Unless you search for the term in quotes, "aslaen vaugn". In which case we cover the first few pages here as well:

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    Technically this may be a dupe of "did you mean", but I am voting to re-open anyways since this question is more specific, the Q&A is so much higher quality than the one it was closed as a dupe of, and OP wants to add their own answer.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Jul 31, 2020 at 19:12

4 Answers 4

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At least on my computer, Google isn't having any trouble returning the site when the entire name ("Aslaen Vaugn Luminare") is queried, with and without quotation marks. I suspect this is because the homepage's title tag is "Aslaen Vaugn Luminare", its meta-description starts with 'Aslaen Vaugn Luminare', and there's really not a lot of copy on the website to work with. Update those and add more copy to the homepage that uses the two-word name.

I ran a fairly SEO-scrappy fashion blog back in the day, so here's some advice to get some traction on Google (in no particular order):

  1. Get on Google Merchant Center - it's free now. (https://blog.google/products/shopping/its-now-free-to-sell-on-google/) Make sure you submit your sitemap that is at https://aslaenvaugn.com/sitemap.xml to your Google Search Console account.

  2. Although it is only a rough gauge of your backlink profile according to Google, ahrefs.com says you have about 17 backlinks from only 5 domains. Regardless of the awards the collection has received, the brand is effectively unknown on the web. Get institutional publishers and bloggers (the former has more "clout" at the moment than the latter) to talk about your stuff and make sure they include links.

  3. You don't have any social media channels listed on your website. Almost every brand that Google recognizes, i.e. is included in Google's Knowledge Graph as an entity, has a least a Twitter profile that they link to from their footer.

  4. The GMB profile for the brand might be doing some damage believe it or not. GMB is only intended for "businesses that either have a physical location that customers can visit, or that travel to visit customers where they are," so not for strict manufacturers . (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en) At the very least, having the service area set for the entire continent but no hours isn't doing you any good.

  5. If you're looking to get a knowledge panel - which is a different beast than a GMB profile - try adding some structured data to your site. Start with WebSite and Organization itemTypes as described at https://sherpas.design/blogs/e-commerce/structured-data-for-shopify#homepage and then work your way down. Also, build some entries in business directories devoted to clothing/ accessories ecommerce, etc., which will of course also help with #1's efforts as entries tend to come with backlinks. Use the two-word name!

  6. Speed up your website. The fade-in's and whatnot are enormous and there's other ways to convey the effect without using huge animation files plus lots of JavaScript. Would honestly hire a developer to do it right or get rid of the effect for now.

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  • homepage's title tag is "Aslaen Vaugn Luminare" This is a good idea and I have changed the title. It is very confusing though that if I misspell part of the search term, it does not suggest alternate spelling. For instance, "Aslan Vaugn" or "Aslaen Vaughn" both show my site as the first result. Only if people correctly spell my company's name does it change the spelling to a term that yields only 2 results with no backlinks and 14 likes.
    – orbitingeden
    Jul 29, 2020 at 20:59
  • YT search is comically worse. Try searching for "Aslaen Vaugn Luminare" on youtube. For reference, we sell luxury handbags that are typically remarked on as "classy".
    – orbitingeden
    Jul 29, 2020 at 21:47
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    Being consistent with the name is a big deal. It's how Google first can tell that something might be worthy of being an entity in the Knowledge Graph and it's also how Google finds the first references/ citations to build mini-knowledge graphs.
    – I Capulet
    Jul 30, 2020 at 0:18
  • My company name has been consistent. I was referring to the search terms used in Google search. If you change those around, you get my company at the top despite the misspelling. It's only if you type in the full, correct spelling that we don't show up at all.
    – orbitingeden
    Jul 31, 2020 at 1:31
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Unless you search for the term in quotes, "aslaen vaugn". In which case we cover the first few pages here as well.

This actually sticks out as a red flag to me, believe it or not. For an established brand, I would expect at least one of the following to be part of those first few pages:

  • An independent review of your product

  • A news article covering what makes your business unique

  • Customers posting about your products publicly on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

  • An affiliate marketer or retailer selling or otherwise directing attention to your product

The fact that nobody has yet found it worthy to note your brand in these ways could be sending Google a signal that your brand is not noteworthy.

Before Google treats your brand as "a real thing", they will want to see other legitimate sites across the internet treating your brand as "a real thing" too. Google specifically tracks brand mentions, and they won't consider you a "real" brand until you're mentioned in context across the internet.

Bottom line is that you're really getting 30,000 views over 7 months, I would expect to see at least one fashion blogger blogging about it or mentioning it on social media or in the news or something, and Google expects this too. From not just an SEO standpoint but also a general business standpoint, it could be useful to ask yourself why you're not seeing that.

Side note: Regarding backlinks, always go for quality over quantity. One single high-quality backlink (e.g. a fashion blog) could be worth literally hundreds of low-quality backlinks (e.g. nofollow, auto-generated blogspam, or listing sites, which could even be counted negatively in certain circumstances).

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  • We have received awards, reviews and praise from customers on FB, IG, etc. and on their home pages. We have a few affiliate retailers and marketers selling our products online. Unfortunately, we had our fashion shows in Milan, Paris, Moscow and NYC all cancel. We have only been able to get a tiny bit of exposure in a small fashion show in Miami.
    – orbitingeden
    Jul 22, 2020 at 6:31
  • In doing searches on not just Google but Bing too to help rule out any special issues with them, coverage just seems very sparse to me. The awards don't appear to me to be syndicated anywhere except for the awards websites themselves, though it's quite possible I missed the syndication. I could only find one single user mention of the brand on Instagram, though it's quite possible my search missed some. I could not find any mentions on user "home pages" (I assume you mean independent blogs), but again, my search could have missed that. I'm just not really finding what you're mentioning.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Jul 22, 2020 at 6:57
  • You are asserting that Google has determined that Aslaen Vaugn is a brand, deemed it insufficiently noteworthy, and so has suppressed all results relating to it — including those from several major social media platforms — in favour of results about an obscure musician's newborn child with a similar name. Do you have any verifiable evidence to support this?
    – GDVS
    Jul 23, 2020 at 12:41
  • @GDav I'm not really asserting that. On the contrary, it's likely that Google does not yet recognize Aslaen Vaugn as a brand. It's not suppressing results, there just aren't enough high quality results for Google to consider Aslaen Vaugn a "real thing" and not just a jumble of letters. When you say results "from several major social media platforms", like I said that is not what I found, and I used Bing too to make sure it wasn't just a Google issue. I found exactly one real user mentioning the brand publicly on Instagram, and zero mentioning the brand publicly on Facebook.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Jul 23, 2020 at 17:29
  • @GDav As a final point, the musician you say is "obscure" is actually far from obscure as far as Google would be concerned. He's notable enough that he has a Wikipedia page with 40 citations, and Wikipedia has stringent notability/reliability guidelines. Google inherently places a ton of trust in Wikipedia articles - to them it's the very strongest single signal on the internet that something is noteworthy.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Jul 23, 2020 at 17:44
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We can only speculate, but I suspect the problem is simply what it appears to be: Google mistakes your brand name as a misspelling of something else.

Bear in mind that Google uses natural language algorithms and machine learning which, while smart, are easily confused by novel and obscure language.

On the face of it, it is odd that Google would make this error seemingly based on an obscure Facebook post. But:

  1. That post seems to pre-date your brand name (i.e. Google saw it first)
  2. The two names are very similar
  3. They use words which are unusual in English, yet similar to common names or words (like "Vaughn").

As evidence, note that non-English versions of Google Search (such as Italian, below) have no trouble. This suggests it's not a problem with your brand or website as such, but a language-specific processing issue in Google.

Search results for Aslaen Vaugn in Google Italy

If this speculation is correct, it's a tricky problem to solve since very little of it is in your direct control. As a starting point, I'd suggest:

  1. Use "feedback" links in Google Search, Google My Business, etc. to report the issue.
  2. Try influencing Google's Knowledge Graph via structured data, open knowledge bases, etc.
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  • I agree with your premise but not your conclusion. Firstly, Google's "feedback" button is a flag for manual review, and won't do anything unless it's pressed by a ton of people. Secondly, if Google doesn't even recognize the name Aslaen Vaugn as a valid search term, then it's futile to try to get them to recognize it as a full-blown Knowledge Graph entity, which is a much higher bar to pass in terms of trust and authority. The best solution is to accrue more real brand mentions on social media, and more high-quality backlinks and mentions from relevant sites in the fashion niche.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Jul 23, 2020 at 17:40
  • As I said very little is in their direct control. I agree the feedback button is a small lever, but it's one of the few options we have when the problem is an error in their technology. To your second point, I disagree that it's futile. It's one of a very few methods we have of directly influencing Google's model of the real world. Further, if you accept that the issue's rooted in a linguistic error, then I don't see how backlinks and "brand mentions" will help — not least since, as I've shown, the site ranks fine in Google Italy.
    – GDVS
    Jul 24, 2020 at 12:06
  • I believe Google genuinely thinks it's misspelled and is trying to correct the user's search. I had a tool called "Automatune" that suffered from this same issue, Google kept trying to correct it to "Otomatone". Now that I got some backlinks and moved it to a higher DA domain, Google only asks about autocorrecting it instead of doing it automatically, and my tool ranks first page for the branded query even though it has otherwise weak SEO. I'm sure that if I built more links and mentions, Google would remove the autocorrect suggestion altogether.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Jul 24, 2020 at 16:27
  • Since Google has to rank so many things that are not dictionary words (brands, names, etc), it can't use a dictionary to correct what people are searching for. So it looks for mentions of things on the internet using natural language processing. Imagine if your friends all started talking about something called "Maddababy", you would start to think "hey, Maddababy must be a real thing, a brand or person or disease or something, I should stop trying to correct people when they say it". Google's "friends" in this analogy are high-reputation websites.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Jul 24, 2020 at 16:33
  • The answer from both is that I am jacked due to a "language-specific processing issue" and I need to convince Google that my company's name is correct spelling. Which would seem to be an impossible goal for a shoestring start-up. My member boutiques are all in metropolitan downtown areas on lockdown and being looted. Virtually no sales are coming from there and nobody can find me online. I hate this world.
    – orbitingeden
    Jul 26, 2020 at 7:46
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I changed the home page <title> tag from "Aslaen Vaugn" to "Aslaen Vaugn - Aslan Vaughn". I also changed the alt text of the logos (which was in an <H1> tag) from "Aslaen Vaugn" to "Aslan Vaughn".

These solutions barely effect UX and have the potential to train Google's search function. It took about 12 hours to percolate and my company is now the first result in Google searches.

Still not working on youtube, but Google search is 95% of the issue.

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  • As a late-coming follow-up, Google now automatically changes the spelling to "Allen Vaughn". This is a case of someone in Google who doesn't like me changing the search results. Probably Rachel Rappaport, but who know for sure. It doesn't matter though, Aslaen Vaugn is now a defunct business - we didn't survive Covid and censorship, but it was an interesting ride.
    – orbitingeden
    Jan 25 at 8:07

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