Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?

First question is, Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on “brands” in search engine rankings? If the answer is “Yes” – what is Google’s definition of a brand? Inspired by Aaron’s Wall’s post: http://www.seobook.com/google-branding. That comes from Monica, Madison, WI.

So I’ll try to give a pretty complete answer to this. I was planning on talking about a little bit more at pub-con in Austin in just a couple of weeks. But inside of Google at least within the search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands. We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, page rank, high quality and so the Google philosophy on search results has been the same pretty much for ever. It’s that if somebody comes to Google and types an “x”, we want to return high quality information about ‘x’. And sometimes that’s a brand search; sometimes that’s an information search; sometimes that’s navigational; sometimes it’s transactional, so there are all sorts of different information needs that people have. First off, Yes, Google has made a change in our rankings; it’s one of over 300 or 400 changes that we make every year. So I wouldn’t call this an update, I would call it just a simple change. If we have to refer to it, one of the people did a lot of work on it, his name was Venz and this particular change we talk about is Venz’s change within the Google places. So I wouldn’t really call it an update, but I would say that, there has been at least a change in how we do some rankings. It doesn’t affect a vast majority of queries it’s more likely and most people haven’t even noticed it; I mean Aaron talked about it and I think even before that people at webmaster were talking about it. But it affects relatively a small number of queries, it’s not like it affects a ton of long queries or anything like that. I don’t think of it as putting more weight on brands, we don’t really think about “brands” in search quality that much. For example, if you type eclipse, if Google was really focused on brands we might return Mitsubishi eclipse you know number one or something like that. And if you actually go to Google and type in eclipse, we’ve got eclipse.org because it’s a development environment, we’ve got Nasa’s eclipse website and there are some commercial results, for example; Eclipse is the name of the book in the Twilight series, so we’ve got a page from amazon. But it’s not like we always try to return brands, we try to return whatever we think the best results are for users. So the net update of this change is pretty simple, we try to return high quality results, we think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, page rank and so what you should be doing doesn’t change. Try to make a great site, try to make a site that is so fantastic that you sort of become known as an authority in your niche. It doesn’t have to be a big niche, it doesn’t have to be a huge well-known keyword, it can be a smaller niche and if you are still the expert and that’s the sort of thing that people want to link to or talk about, the sort of things that people really enjoy and those are the sort of sites the experts that we want to bring back.

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