We’ve been trying to figure out the brand algorithm ever since the brand update hit the UK in June but nobody has really had the answer so far.
This week during the meet the search engines session Matthew Trewhella from Google gave the best description so far of the brand update.
I’m going to paraphrase here but from the comments Matthew made the brand update is about Google minimising the number of times people have to search to find the products or information they are looking for. Every time a user has to perform a second search Google regards it as their failure for not bring up the right result the first time.
So what Google is doing is testing which results are going to give the least number of secondary searches and displaying those. In the past somebody might have searched for “travel insurance” and found a few good sites before remembering that the Post Office does travel insurance too and searched for them to get a comparison. For Google this is regarded as a bit of a failure because they didn’t bring up the Post Office in the first place.
Google can perform multivariate testing to see which 10 results to display and in what order they should be displayed in order to give the lowest number of repeat searches.
Any site that has a good brand search volume and a good “satisfaction rate” (my words, not Googles) for a query will stand a good chance of keeping on the front page and moving higher. The satisfaction rate is basically the percentage of visitors who visit your site using a particular query and either buy your product or get an answer to their question without having to search again on Google.
Matthew was evasive when I asked whether the brand update would be rolled out for more keywords. At present it’s just a few dozen but if Google has got this right then they could change the rankings of thousands of keywords overnight in the next few months.
The main purpose of the caffeine update was to allow Google to push the envelope in terms of size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. If one of these dimensions is a better ability to perform live multivariate testing on hundreds of thousands of search results then be prepared for some changes and start improving your satisfaction rates.
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.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I haven’t seen Vince on a few dozen keyword sets – I see it in every vertical where there is a dominant brand.
I agree with Ari on this one, I’ve seen a lot of examples of brands (or successful sites) that were boosted over a large range of keywords, not just a few dozen. Also, it’s not like Google to cherry pick a few terms to apply an algorithm too – there’ll be a reason why they’ve chosen those terms, and it’ll likely be because those terms have a high volume of searches and a very high volume of those searches being refined.
You might also find this post interesting, from last month
Hey Mate, I’ve read a couple of posts on your blog and I love your style. I am going to subscribe to your RSS feed
Find me on Digg | Facebook | Reddit | StumbleUpon | Twitter
Thanks for the post and for sharing the information on brand updates. Nice post…!!
More comments from tag44Satisfaction with brand search should be 100%
It throws up questions over what variables google is using to correlate user behaviour as outlined in your second paragraph with satisfaction. Are you losing rankings because your prices are too high and the customer decides to re-search?
{ 1 }
@GuavaMarkeD @neyne did you see this blogstorm post? http://bit.ly/4zZw2h <– Came out about a month after mine, seems to support it
{ 9 trackbacks }
Leave a Comment (registration is optional)