"Inside of Google, at least inside the search ranking team, we don't really think about brands. We think about words like 'trust' 'authority' 'reputation' 'PageRank' 'high quality'.
The Google philosophy on search results has been the same, pretty much forever, is that somebody comes to Google and types in X, we want to return high quality information about X. And sometimes that's a brand search, sometimes that's an informational search, sometimes it's navigational, sometimes it's transactional."
"First off, YES, Google has made a change in our rankings, it's one of over 3-400 we make very year. So, I wouldn't call it an 'update', I would call it a simple change. If you have to refer to it, one of the people that did a lot of work on it, his name is Vince. This particular change, we talk about it as 'Vince's change' within the Googleplex.
I wouldn't really call it an update, but there has been a change in how we do some rankings. It doesn't affect a vast majority of queries, it's more likely, and most people haven't noticed it. I mean Aaron talked about it and I think even before that people at WebMasterWorld were talking about it. But it affects a relatively small number of queries, it's not like it affects 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 really think about 'brands' in search quality that much. For example if you type 'eclipse', if Google were really focused on brands we'd return 'Mitsubishi Eclipse' at number one, or something like that.
And if you actually GO to Google and type in 'eclipse', we've got eclipse.org cause there's a development environment. We've got Nasa's eclipse website, and then there are some commercial results. For example, 'eclipse' is the name of that book in the Twilight series, so we've got a page from Amazon.
It's not that we always try to return brands. We try to return whatever we think the best results are for users. So, the net upshot of this change is pretty simple, we try to return high quality results. We think about trust, reputation, authority, PageRank and so what you should be doing doesn't change. Try to make a great site, try to make it the site that is sooo fantastic that you become an authority in your niche.
And it doesn't have to be a big nice. It doesn't have to be a huge, well known, key word. It can still be a smaller niche, that's the thing people are going to want to link to, that they'll talk about, the sort of things people really enjoy. Those are the sort of sites, the experts, that we want to bring back" |
Comments
My take on all of this is the issue of semantics. Someone calls it an algorithm change while others are simply calling it a small update. The fact of the matter is that it makes absolutely not difference what you call it. Something changed.
It is pretty clear that some dial has been turned up or down and it seems like that dial is connected to characteristics shared by many big brand websites.
Of course, we are not at the point yet that our psychological interpretation of a brand is being interpreted by Google. But there are clearly some factors that these brand websites have in a common and a couple of switches have been pulled and dials turned that use those signals to score results.
I can tell you from personal experience that a MAJOR BRAND I am working with has all of their business units split up by subdomains and we have seen some very significant drops for very competitive terms. Mid-level terms have not been effected. This may speak to increased value being assigned to domain authority (whatever that is, right?).
To me, the most consistent statements have been around query spaces and authority. This could be a few things, but seems a likely starting point at least.
You anecdotal evidence on a large brand U manage kind of kills the idea of global link valuations as I'd imagine sub-domains of strong brands would benefit not be hurt by such a move.
I have no doubts of Matt's assertion that it isn't 'brand specific' per se as that simply doesn't make sense (from an IR perspective at least).
I've been watching the tin-foil hat posts that have since sprung up and it's amazing how people read so much 'cloak and dagger' into something that is far simpler and obviously targeted at the user experience not corp. agendas
The jury is still out...
"I wasn't familiar with this one, so I dropped an email to Ola Rosling, the Googler employee who wrote the blog post announcement," says Cutts. "It turns out that there
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