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Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?

 
 

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Question: “Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?”

Answer: Inside the Search Quality Team they think less about brands and more about words like trust, authority, reputation, PageRank and high quality. Google has made a small change in their rankings through which brands get higher scores for certain queries that coincide with all the aforementioned words. Only a small percentage of queries are affected though. Google will always try to return the highest quality results for its users.
0:33
So I'll try to give a pretty complete answer to this. I was planning on talking about it a little bit more at Pubcon in Austin in just a couple weeks but, you know, inside of Google, at least within the Search Ranking Team, we don't really think about “brands”.

0:48
We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, high quality and so the Google philosophy on search results has been the same pretty much forever. It's that, if somebody comes to Google and types in “X” we wanna 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. So there is all sorts of different information needs that people have.

1:15
I wouldn't, so first off, “Yes” Google has made a change in our rankings. It's one of over three- or four-hundred changes that we make every year. So I wouldn't call this an update, you know, I would call it just a simple change. One in the, if you have to refer to it, one of the people that did a lot of work on it, his name was Vince and so, you know, this particular change, we talk about it as being sort of Vince's change within the Googleplex.

1:40
So I wouldn't really call it an update but I would say that there has been at least 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 even noticed it, I mean, Aaron talked about it and I think even before that people on 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.

2:06
I don't think of it as putting more weight on brands. Like we really don't think about “brands” in Search Quality that much. For example, if you type “eclipse”, if Google were really focused on brands, we might return “Mitsubishi Eclipse”, you know, at number one or something like that and if you actually go to Google and type in “eclipse”, we got eclipse.org, you know, because there's a development environment, we've got NASAs 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 but it's not that we try to always return brands. We try to return whatever we think the best results are for users.

2:44
So, the net update, the net upshot of this change is pretty simple, you know. We try to return high quality results. We think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, PageRank and so what you should be doing doesn't change.

3:00
Try to make a great site, try to make it a site that is so fantastic that you sort of become known as an authority in your niche and it doesn't have to be a big niche. It doesn't have to be, you know, a huge, well known, keyword. It can be a smaller niche and if you're still the expert thats the sort of thing that people are gonna want, gonna link to, they'll talk about, the sort of things people will really enjoy and those are the sorts of sites, the experts, that we want to bring back.