An SEO professional created a brand-new Google Chrome extension. There’s a landing page on the Chrome Web Store, which allows a user to click to install the new extension on their Chrome browser.
They asked John about the advertising set up they created through SEO. Basically, they created a domain targeted to the name of the extension, which shows similar content to the store page.
It also links back to the store page.
That’s all the content they have for the entire domain – it’s just a landing page that sends users to the Chrome web store to install that extension.
The eventual goal is to have either one of these two URLs to show up in the search results. The SEO pro does not care which one does.
Their question to John was: which of these extensions, in his opinion, is going to rank better?
John explained that it’s impossible to say, because much of the ranking of these pages is dependent on how they are interconnected with the rest of the web.
He expounded that it’s likely easier for your own domain to show up in the search results, because you have more control over that and it’s much easier to define exactly what you want to have presented.
This happens at approximately the 0:43 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 1 0:43
So I recently built a new Chrome extension, and I’m waiting for it to be indexed. And hopefully people can find it. The extension has a landing page on the Chrome Web Store, which is the page where a user clicks a button to install the extension to Chrome.
And on that page, it also has the name and description of the extension, which was submitted by me. And I don’t otherwise come to other parts of that page, just the name and description. But I think it’s good, it’s good, good enough for me, and I don’t need anything else. So that page has an URL, and it can rank.
Meanwhile, I also created a dedicated website pointing to it, let’s say my Chrome extension is called ABCD. Then I also created abcd.com, which shows very similar content as the store page says ABCD is a Chrome extension that can do this for you, if you want to try it out click this link to install. And that link, of course, links back to the store page.
And that’s all for this entire domain. It just does this one thing. And I didn’t create this domain because I need to show additional content. I just created it because I thought maybe it could rank better.
The goal is to have either one of these two URLs show up in search, I don’t care which one. So first of all, I want to ask you, based on this setup, which one of these two UR.. two URLs do you think is going to rank better?
John 2:21
I think it’s impossible to say, for the long run, because it depends quite a bit on how it’s kind of interconnected with the rest of the web. And kind of like, I imagine, in the beginning, it might be easier for your own domain to be visible in search, just because you have a little bit more control over that, you can define exactly what you want to have presented, you can submit that to Google to be indexed directly. In the long run, I don’t know.
SEO Professional 1 2:55
Is Google going to look at the domain and think this seems to be only pointing to the web, this web page. So this web page might be more canonical?
John 3:07
No.
SEO Professional 3:09
Or is it gonna think that the Chrome Web Store is more trustworthy domain to begin with?
John 3:14
I don’t, I don’t think there’s any kind of automatic bias in that regard there.
SEO Professional 1 3:22
Even if it’s a fresh, new domain?
John 3:27
I mean, it’s a new extension too so it’s like, I, I don’t think we have anything where we’re like, well, if it’s hosted in the Chrome extension store, then it automatically shows up in search. I think that would be something that we’d explicitly try to avoid happening.
