This hasn’t appeared in the UK yet but Google has made some changes to the algorithm and the end result is that brands are ranking higher than they were before.
Aaron Wall spotted this first and Matt Cutts has confirmed it today by denying that it was an update, more of an alteration. Whether you are confused or not it’s an important change.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Hi Patrick
The title is a bit misleading I think, as you have to ask yourself what is a brand? Matt Cutts specifically states that they do not look at brands only authority, trust, and pagerank.
I believe this is only a tiny tweak that gives more power towards this authority, trust, and pagerank. This is the way the algo has always worked in my opinion and it may of just been tweaked a little.
There is no way Google would look at for example Carphone Warehouse and think brand, lets rank them highly. They still look at the likes of content, structures and links, and of course big companies (brands) are going to have better stronger links and that is why they are ranking higher, because people are naturally linking to them. But not because they are just a brand name.
The title of the blog will make people think that if for example “First choice” launched a brand new site, it will rank a lot better simply because of its name, but this is not the case if they have horrid onsite optimisation and no links pointing to the site they will be going no where fast. But on the other hand because they have contacts and a big customer base they will naturally get a huge amounts of links etc
a@ Musa – last month the “brands” had the same “content, structures and links, and of course big companies (brands) are going to have better stronger links” . Google have made a change, as Matt Cutts said, which appears to favour brands. So the killer question which factors has google used to identify “brands”. It must be something new, or a new combination of factors.
I do not think its about “New” factors, they have just put more weight against the authority, trust, and pagerank then they did before
As an example and this is just an example
Lets say a site has been around for a long time, has great content, fully trusted and a very good pagerank. And it was being out ranked by a site that was solely relying on links (Which most are probably artificial and bought and something that I was seeing occur a lot). Then Googles new tweak would give more power towards these trusted sites (NOT brands).
And to be honest real SEOs should not be feeling this latest tweak because they should have effectivley been creating a site that meets the above criteria.
If Google changes something and people begin complaining than you know they have done something right, as most of the people complaining probably do not deserve to be in top flight positions anyway.
Hi Patrick now that big brands rank better, will they spend less on Adwords?
I don’t know about anyone else in the UK, but I’m starting to see this in my industry now. Bizarrely on one specific product query, the top result has 8 sitelinks, each of which is in a different language, odd.
How can SEO and a search engine marketing campaign improve Leadsmarketer website (www.leadsmarketer.com) position in the search engines? Our marketing and sales department invested a lot of resources in writing all the content for our web site but we just can’t seem to be ranking high enough in the engines, while our competition is on top. Do we have to re-write it all over again?
yvonh
That’s a good point.
Hmm — have not been to this blog before. Interesting thoughts — however, the date stamps on the comment posts (its 4/16/09) and many comment posts are stamped June 2009 and later — well, I guess I’m viewing a conversation that hasnt taken place yet.
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