How Do Google Determine a Brand? Heres the Answer
Since the brand update was released by Google there has been numerous SEOs asking “How they infact determine a brand”. There have been a huge amount of suggestions by various big name SEOs and other industry experts such as the following:
1) Looking at analytics data
2) Looking at offline activity
3) People searching for the brand domain
While all these may play a major part, I have been undecisive at why brands actually deserve to be ranking for highly competitive words if they are not making the effort until now. After checking and analysing most of the current results, it actually could be a great update for the search industry. The reason I say this is as follows.
For so long Google have been giving so much power to links and anchor text and although they still do, this brand update could in my opinion be introducing “brand citation” a lot more. Lets think of it this way, to have a brand, you have to have a lot of buzz surrounding that thing. As an example lets take Ford who have recently got a major boost in all of their positions. How many citations of ford do you think there are around the whole internet? Would the majority of people actually talking about Ford link back to them? A high percentage would not, lets just say someone wrote a blog post or a news story such as the BBC and it read as follows.
“Ford have released a new model of the highly succesful Mondeo car, this new car is set to introduce a new era of driving”.
Now thinking about it a huge amount of sites would actually do something like this, then if on the other hand you had Mr Smiths car related site called mrsmithautos.com as an example, that has great content and a great structure but has actually gone out and got himself lots of great backlinks with perfect targetted anchor text, in Googles eyes this is a lot less natural then people actually talking about his site. And in most occasions Mr Smiths site will not have any REAL citations such as “mrsmithautos are releasing a new innovative approach to selling cars online”.
But with the ford sentence above, Google have the processing power to analyse and understand all the content around the Brand, so they know that in high probability that the person is talking about the Brand ford and the site gets a boost for the keywords around it. Again as Matt Cutts indicated the higher the PR and relevancy of the site referencing the brand name, the more power will be passed through.
Its the same if you look at another brand Autotrader, there are a huge amount of people that write personal blog posts such as “I just purchased a great second hand BMW for Autotrader, it only cost me £1000″. Just because that term is not linked why should Autotrader not get any benefits from it? We all know that with the rise in popularity of social media sites such as Twitter a vast amount of people are going to be citing brands.
In my opinion Google from what it seems could be actually analysing content and references a lot more, its the perfect solution ifyou have a brand people are going to talk about it in general sentence not just link to it and this is what Google may now well be analysing and it could be the reason as to why some of the results are slightly out of shape as they further tweak the algo to get this right.
Just my two cents, to create a brand you need to have something good to offer and great content so people discuss your site a lot more.
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Interesting insight. Had not thought of this. You can see the statistics from something similar that Majestic SEO have done with their plain text domain parsing.
One that has got me puzzled is:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sem
The 4th result down sticks out links a sore thumb links-wise, but is a niche brand representing high-profile people. This came up out of nowhere about 2 months ago. There is very little reference to them online, but the only reason I can see them being bumped up for is brand-related.
Yes this could be one of the reason, but we may not ignore another possibility where Branded companies itself are publicing their brands thru Premium publicity or advertising.
Thou google can easily detect the traffic detour from one link to another, but still getting traffic is itself a main thing
So i do suspect that first publicity will effecting the market and then traffic, who cares after all, Branded companies are enjoying their monopolies…lol
Hi David
Personally terms such as SEM cover such a wide range of things, that Google have to deliver all results for different searchers.
So again whereas that brand may be referenced with other citations surrounding it, Google are seeing it as the brand in a different SEM way, if you sort of understand what I mean.
[...] http://www.seotops.com/the-big-question-how-are-google-ranking-brands_1083/ [...]
By their nature, big brands are also “trusted” sites. This is the year the link poor got poorer and the link rich got richer – without having to do anything.
How do they figure out citations for Apple? I don’t think people use the full name Apple Computers Inc. or Apple Inc. (changed recently).
For non dictionary words it makes sense to use almost every occurrence of the word as a citation to a brand and associating the brand with a website with maximum authority backlinks (or may be just backlinks from press release sites)
It is very bad on the part of Google to do this. They should also look at the upcoming sites and i am sure many upcoming site have got huge ability to become a brand. After all the sites that are brand today were sometimes before a new site.
This approach does make sense from a logical point of view but as mentioned above the problem is that what happens when the brand name is an actual word in its own right, such as Apple, Confused (i.e. Confused.com) and Caterpillar?
Also, there’s the issue over exact match domain names – how does Google make the distinction between everyday speech (‘cheap flights’) and references to the actual website CheapFlights.com?
As mentioned above Google most probably have the processing power to analyse sentences and know the difference if someone is talking about the fruit Apple or the brand.
These aremy opinions remember, and I dont think Google have it perfect by any means, because that could be a slight factor as to why a lot of the results are unstable at the moment
Very interesting point. I think it could maybe be a factor but not one that holds much weight. I would be even easier to game than trying to get links
Thanks Duncan
Again they would probably be looking at domain authority for this such as gettig references on big sites such as the BBC or specifc niche power sites
So in some ways it could be a lot harder and a lot easier to spot spam and manipulation
It makes a lot of sense that citations have become more important with the Vince update. While this doesn’t make it impossible for the ‘little guys’ from being able to outrank the big boys (you can still generate buzz online about a small company), the amount of global reach and marketing / advertising budget in the hands of these multinational companies makes the web a very uneven playing field as far as citation is concerned.
There’s also the question of sentiment behind a citation. I would argue that often there is an implied endorsement behind someone linking to a site – not always of course, but with citations you could have millions of people complaining about how awful a brand is, and that brand then getting a boost in the SERPs??
Google’s purpose is to answer the question “what is the best page relevant to this query” and the noise in using citations as an indicator for this means I don’t think citations will be coming near to links as a ranking factor anytime soon.
Google sometimes is very strict in determining a brand. The older the domain the highly is the respect in the eyes of Google. It also looks at the performance that too over all.
Interesting perspective. I must say, I’ve recently experienced positive movement in the SERPs as a result of the update. Sure enough, the site is a brand with a great deal of citation and so, the theory stands true
This move away from keyword rich links has got to be a good thing for the quality of search results (although it is currently playing havoc with SERPs in some industries).
My concern is that this update swings the pendulum further towards those who can afford a quality PR team and therefore nurture mentions on quality sites…. basically just shifting the problem
It takes a lot of time to determine a brand. It is not a quick process and it take a lot of time to do this. Generally they see it progress and how they perform and their domain age is also taken into account.
Interesting point you got there. I think domain age really is heavy weight aspect.
Btw, I’m new to this site, but I’ve already bookmarked it!
Keep up the good work!
Actually they definitely don´t look at analytics data – Matt Cutts has stated that. What they probably look at is the total number of brand name searches.
If your brand is, for example, nike, and you have a site nike.com and it has some rank already and there are TONS of searches for “nike” then it´s probably a brand.
Interesting Point. After reading I remember hearing something about google not looking at the analytical data as Matt has said above. I’m new to this site but i’ll b back. Keep up th good work. Cheers
It is very bad on the part of Google to do this. They should also look at the upcoming sites and i am sure many upcoming site have got huge ability to become a brand. After all the sites that are brand today were sometimes before a new site.
Brand can be decided only after you see the progress of a particular site or firm after seeing its progress. To become a brand it takes a lot of hard work and lot of work has to be done to become so. If you become a brand then you are the most favorable of all the small sites.
Many people have a dream of becoming a brand and i suppose it is not so easy to become a brand. There are a lot of difficulties for becoming a brand. Nice point discussed man….surely it is awesome.
yeah! i am agree with you.
nice site for seo tips. i like your website.
good information for me.
thanks
who is big will get bigger and who is small wil get smaller
Wow I didn’t know search engines cared about brands but I guess it kinda makes sense
Branding is essential in order to gain trust withing Search engines.
Its a strong signal of trust when loads of high authority domains link to you using a mix of brand a keyword rich anchor texts..
I also agree with your point about references in social media – its a big signalk that cannot be ignored right now in the branding issue.
Scott
Interesting read thanks – This is the first i’ve heard of Google using the number of citations to ascertain ‘branding’ in order to determine search results.
As a system its just as open to corruption and manipulation as the PageRank/Link structure at the moment though – surely SEO’s could pay blogs for mentions and citations rather than links?
Another drawback was mentioned by another user – A fraudulent company could be perceived as being a brand by Google when they get ALOT of negative press. This would serve to reduce the quality of search results, not improve them.