I’ll try to give a pretty complete answer to this. I was planning on talking about it a little bit more at PubCon in Austin, in just a couple of weeks. But, inside Google, at least within search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands.
We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, high quality. Google philosophy on search results has been the same pretty much forever.
It’s that if somebody comes to Google and types in ‘x’, we want to return high quality information about ‘x’. Sometimes that’s a brand search, sometimes it’s an informational search, sometimes that’s a navigational, sometimes transactional search. So there’s all sorts of different information needs people have.
Yes, Google has made a change in our rankings. It’s one of over 300-400 changes we make every year. So I wouldn’t call this an update, just a simple change. If you have to refer to it – one of the people I worked on this with, his name was Vince, so about this particular change we talk about as Vince’s change within the Google plex.
So I wouldn’t really call it an update, but I would say that there has been at least change and how we do some rankings. It doesn’t affect a vast majority of rankings; most people haven’t even noticed it. Aaron talked about it and even before that people on Webmaster World were talking about it.
It affects relatively a small number of queries, it’s not like it affects a a ton of long tail queries or anything like that.
I don’t think of it as putting more weight on brands, we don’t think about brands in search quality that much.
For example, if you type in ‘eclipse’, if Google were really focused on brands, we might have returned ‘Mitsubishi Eclipse’ as number one, or something like that.
And if you actually go to Google and type in ‘eclipse’, we’ve got Eclipse.Org because there’s a development environment, we’ve got NASA’s Eclipse website. There are some commercial results. For example, Eclipse is the name of that book in Twilight series, so we’ve got a page from Amazon.Com.
But it’s not like we always try to return brands, we try to return whatever we think are the best results for users.
The net update of this change is pretty simple; we try to return high quality results, we think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, PageRank, and what you should be doing shouldn’t change. Try to make a great site, try to make a site that is so fantastic that you 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 could be a smaller niche and if you’re still an expert, that’s the sort of thing that people would want to link to. They’ll talk about the sort of things they really enjoy, and those are the sort of sites and experts that we want to bring back.
Related posts:
- As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well irregardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine result pages?
- In some queries I can see the date of the post/article in the description snippet (at Google search). Why? Can I tell Google not to use it? If yes, how?
- We are changing a fairly large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not lose our search rankings?
- How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?
- What impact does server location have on Google rankings?
