http:\/\/www.seobook.com\/google-branding<\/a>. That comes from Monica, Madison, WI.<\/strong><\/p>\nSo I\u2019ll 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\u2019t 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\u2019s that if somebody comes to Google and types an \u201cx\u201d, we want to return high quality information about \u2018x\u2019. And sometimes that\u2019s a brand search; sometimes that\u2019s an information search; sometimes that\u2019s navigational; sometimes it\u2019s 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\u2019s one of over 300 or 400 changes that we make every year. So I wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019s change within the Google places. So I wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t affect a vast majority of queries it\u2019s more likely and most people haven\u2019t 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\u2019s not like it affects a ton of long queries or anything like that. I don\u2019t think of it as putting more weight on brands, we don\u2019t really think about \u201cbrands\u201d 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\u2019ve got eclipse.org because it\u2019s a development environment, we\u2019ve got Nasa\u2019s eclipse website and there are some commercial results, for example; Eclipse is the name of the book in the Twilight series, so we\u2019ve got a page from amazon. But it\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t have to be a big niche, it doesn\u2019t have to be a huge well-known keyword, it can be a smaller niche and if you are still the expert and that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First question is, Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on \u201cbrands\u201d in search engine rankings? If the answer is \u201cYes\u201d \u2013 what is Google\u2019s definition of a brand? Inspired by Aaron\u2019s Wall\u2019s post: http:\/\/www.seobook.com\/google-branding. That comes from Monica, Madison, WI. So I\u2019ll try to give a pretty complete answer to this. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mattcutts-video-transcript"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":784,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.searchenginegenie.com\/blog-seo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}