Brands Search and SEO
Google has finally come out and confirmed the “Vince change” which favours big brands.
Outrage, arms thrown in air, search engine optimisation (SEO) has changed for ever…
So what does this mean? Firstly Google admits making a number of changes continually, so this is 1 of 3-400 annually which occur annually, and it is a change, not an update. So put your arms down and read further.
Matt Cutts at Google has tried to explain it, we think it goes further. According to Google, the dial has been turned up from brands and thus related generic keywords, searchineland gives great examples around “air tickets” and airlines.
What Google has said, via the Matt Cutts video:
Trusted sites, potentially brands will rank, as they are trusted. Trusted essentially means:
- PageRank
- Legacy (Age)
- Quality and unique content
- Technical soundness of the site
- No spam
- Good linking structure and outbound links to other quality sites
- Good inbound links from other quality/ expert site
COMMENT: If you give users high quality search results, they will keep on using your search engine. So whats new?
Given the average length of a query is 3-5 words and 25% of all searches each year are new, this only impacts a small number of search terms. Matt Cutts has confirmed this as well.
ISSUE:The change may only affect a small number of search terms, but… most brands are related to products, and if they are a big brand these products are generally popular. Take air tickets for example, which has significant search volumes behind the term. I believe that if you looked at the affected seach volumes as a % of total search volumes this may tell a different story. Effectively, this means that most of the generic terms related to large brands are searched on a lot, they are generally highly competitive terms. Saying the long tail is not affected is fine, but who targets long tail search terms, other than SEO’s who guarantee # 1 rankings.
Here is the video from Matt:
So just to recap. If you are an authority site and all the things that counted before still count, what has changed?
Consider the following:
- Linking is the core of Google’s algorithm
- As a result, many and most spend a lot of time building links
- SEO savy webmasters in many cases use useless anchor text for links to sites that may compete for rankings, or give them a rel=nofollow, or just mention the site and even the URL without a link
- Google spends a lot of time trying to manage sites buying links and has found this very difficult to control without human intervention
So, and I have spoken about this at Cebit for the last 2 years, if linking is a continual focus of those trying to rank and the original purpose of giving credit for an inbound link as a vote for the site is under threat, as well as driving a certain behaviour amongst webmasters. What is the next logical step to watch?
NOISE…
Google would only implement changes that can be managed through software right? they pride themselves on this. So if you have a quality site and all those good things. And your brand is mentioned all over the place along with a certain keyword, you become associated with that keyword right? Just search for air tickets in Google.com.au and you get emirates as a related search. The brand emirates is synonymous with “air tickets”. Google knows this already. How?
Search for emirates+air tickets and exclude the Emirates website and you get around 274,000 pages on the topic, the Emirates site only has around 98 pages odd indexed. A search for air tickets exposes 87,200,000 pages, so Emirates appears in around 0.3% of these pages. The only airline which ranks in the top 10 is Air France. They have a PageRank of 6 and the domain came into being in 2000. They also have around 7m pages with the words Air France and air tickets and bear no real relevance to an Australian search result. Now look at a competing brand such as Qantas, which we would assume would be synonymous with the term. Search for air tickets+qantas and exclude the Qantas pages and you have around 229,000 pages or 0.25%. Emirates is recognised in the related searches, even though it does not rank in the top 10 for the term. An alternate view might be that more people have searched on Emirates than Qantas, but looking at search popularity for Google.com.au, Emirates had around 200k searches per month, while Qantas has around 1,220k per month. Six times more more searches, so its not search volumes driving this. Test this against other examples like nappies check the numbers.
Taking this a step further, can you assume that if there is noise i.e. your brand is mentioned in a number of places along with another common keyword that it is an indicator of what your brand is about. Much like keyword density but across the indexed web as a whole, or noise.
This may be just the beginning, or the end, but for now its an interesting debate. If a brand is mentioned across the web with a specific term there must be brand recognition and thus search engine users might expect the brand to be found in search results, in fact this would give some comfort that they have searched on the correct term, seeing the brand present.
Maybe the social media campaign and engagement with customers and community has moved to a new level.
