Numerous SEO experts have discussed Google’s emphasis on brands in search engine results. For example, see Aaron Wall’s posts regarding the subject.
See the video below for some background:
So I see there are two changes here, one is a difference in search results where brands have some sort of influence. This is the Vince change. The second is a small little bar in Google search results which lists brands on some consumer queries. Check out the picture below:
So if you are interested in SEO, some questions come to mind…
- What constitutes a brand in Google’s eyes? (from the video)
- What effect does a brand have on a particular queries search results? (if the keyword has a brand name vs. if the keyword does not have a brand name, but is “associated” with the brand.
- How did those 5 manufacturers get into the top. Where is Trendnet for example? They also make routers. I do think Google has accurately listed the top brands. Interesting they chose to list Cisco rather than Linksys (Cisco makes the Linksys brand)
- Can we leverage the brand effect?
Some more questions may come up as I right this.
Matt Cutts answers the first question in the video at some level, ie it is not about brands per say, but about returning relevant search results based on the type of query that the user is asking. Google is all about returning what the user wants – or to think about it another way, your perfect search result should appear #1, and you should be able to press “I’m Feeling Lucky” with confidence. Here’s a new motto for google – “It’s not Lucky, its Google”. Anyways, I digress (plus google would not make adsense revenue with too many lucky queries)
So brands are a way to get trust and authority in the search results. Trust and authority are part of the Google mantra, so I will move on.
Aaron Wall covers this too (yes, another outbound link). Anyways, search results have changed, and as you can expect, there is some emphasis on brands.
Question 3 and 4 were really what got me thinking about this. So let’s throw out some ideas, unfiltered for consideration. What makes Google think something is a brand (ie trusted and authoritative, and listed under the brand listing)
- length of domain registration (a classic)
- anchor text being used in links
- anchor text matching the domain name – exactly
- .org, .net. .com all pointing to the same website
- buying adwords for the anchor text
- related listings in google shopping with the word
Feel free to comment on more ideas – and lets go through this list.
Length of domain registration, as covered in this post, is debated. My personal feeling is that it matters, but by a small amount. If Google was ranking on a 100 point scale based on their 200+ factors, maybe this one is worth 1/2 a point. It’s not going to kill you, nor will it be the silver bullet. Remember, this is just a guess. When I have a doubt on what a search engine would do, I just ask myself, “Based on what I know about the web, would I use this as a ranking factor if I was in Google’s shoes?” Google obviously would test this and make sure it does not adversely affect results for common queries, and so on. So I think it is a small factor.
Anchor text distribution is likely skewed in brands where the brand appears in the anchor text with or without modifiers. For example, the brand BMW would have various links to its domains like “BMW 5 series”, “BMW 745i”, “BMW”, “black BMW” and probably some analysis is done on the commonality of anchor text and substrings of the anchor text. I think it is very similar for personal names. When you link to a person’s website, you use “Fulan Khan”, “Fulan writes”, “Fulan Khan wrote about” as anchor text.
Brands probably have a large number of anchor text with the exact match to the domain name. I think this is the most interesting one, and the background why there is a common recommendation to get an exact keyword to domain name. ie If you want to capture the keyword for dog training, you want the domain “dogtraining.com.” I think the recommendation exists because of the brand emphasis, ie that the brand emphasis has made Google give more importance to exact keyword to domain matches, and also anchor text to domain matches.
As for .org, .net, and .com, not every brand or company can claim ownership of all TLDs, so I don’t know if this matters. Maybe it is slightly positive, or has no factor. The few brands I tried could not fit this critera of owning multiple TLD.
Using Adwords to bid on a brand (or as a signal for brand or trust) is something that was brought up by Shark SEO. (Actually he has a great post and my article is quite similar to his) – it makes sense to me, though I don’t know if Google does this.
As for the last bullet point, related products using similar keyword modifiers, yes, I do think this is something Google uses to figure out brand names. The reason I said related products is there are common modifiers which are not brands – for example, “silver”, or “large”, etc… Google needs to eliminate those modifiers from the list of brands.
Now finally, Google is probably using a list of words, and Google does human reviewers. Not everything can be efficiently determined algorithmically.
So that’s the end – what did we learn? Google has some emphasis on brands, because of their desire for accurate search results. Brands are a signal for Google regarding trust. There are probably some algorithmic and human factors involved in determining a brand. By thinking about the algorithmic factors, we can possibly gain an edge.
Thanks for reading.
