Google loves brands, not relevancy
Posted by owen | Filed under Universal search, Updates
About 2 weeks ago some strange things started happening in the SERPs. People were noticing big changes to the rankings with some results that had been stable just flying out the top ten. The rankings were been knocked out by big brands with pages that were not necessarily as well targeted as those they were replacing.
So what the hell was going on? Aaron Wall over at SEOBook wrote an excellent well thought out and factual post about what happened. If you want to find out about the ins and outs of what happened I suggest you read it.
The question for me, now the results seem to be holding and the hoo haa has died down is; Why did Google do it? From a public perspective it appears that it is Googles attempt to clear out the SERPs. Eric Schmidt has made his feelings more than clear on this in the past:
“the answer won’t come by keeping brands from the space; instead, the web needs them to help clean up the net.”
What Google is saying is that brands are a safe option. By pumping these to the top of the SERPs they know they can keep out spammy, blackhat and generally not that great pages. The reason this has become so important all of a sudden lies within universal search.
The direction that Google clearly is pushing in is that there will be more types of search result shown on any one page, this will mean that there is less room for text results. Google wants to ensure the clarity of these very precious top spaces that will display on the first page. They believe the way to do this is ensuring brands takes these slots.
As an SEO I’ve already been talking to my clients about the importance of building a brand online. Whilst I believe there may be some manual intervention in the SERPs from Google at the moment it is simply not scalable unless done algorithmically, hence the need to build brand and so trust.
Domain age, link neighborhoods, CTR and mentions are just a few of the aspects I think Google is going to be relying all the more heavily on. On page factors importance will deteriorate and so will the wonderful variation of sites in the SERPs. Google is essentially cutting off the lifelines of the small time retailers, who until now had been given a reasonably level playing field. Now that’s gone so will the variation it allowed. It’s been sad enough watching our high streets clone each other and all the independent retailers disappear, now it looks like online is going that way too.
One Response to “Google loves brands, not relevancy”
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john evans Says:
March 11th, 2009 at 2:52 pmRight on mate.
Thanks for the insightful read:)