About a month ago Google made a set of changes to its ranking algorithm which became known, unoffically, as Vince Update.
There are a number of theories on how the changes will affect ranking. The brand theory suggests that Google is giving preference to big companies and popular brands over other website based on the fact that brands are often used in search terms. The more a term is searched for, the more important the term. So if that term is a brand name, the number of searches indicates an important brand. The controversial aspect is that the brand-owning site may also rank higher on associated keywords phrases that don’t include the brand name. Thus Coca Cola would rank well for a search on “soft drink”.
One has to ask the question though – wasn’t this always the case? Does the supposed change really make that much difference?
Should you start optimizing your site in a new fashion?
The official statement was that what is known as the Vince (or sometimes called ‘brand’) update is not really an update but rather some slight changes to the algo that only influence a small fraction of queries. First of all this change obviously influences the queries containing brand names in them. Personally I don’t see anything wrong with a company ranking first for its own brand name. Moreover I do believe that the company’s website holds more relevance for the user searching for its brand then a Wikipedia ‘about’ article. But generic keywords are a different cup of tea, so why do big brands get to rank better for these as well?
Let’s once again go back to the basics. What are the major factors that determine the search engine rankings of a website: Reputation, relevance, authority, link popularity, PageRank and trust to name a few.
Big companies and popular brands remain popular online the way they are offline: they get a lot of publicity on the Internet just like they always get talked about offline. They attract a lot of ‘natural’ links with relevant anchor texts and therefore they get to rank high for their keywords. Consider yourself blogging about cars: what websites are you most likely to link out to in your blog posts? That’s right BMW, Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen – that is the brands. They are the major producers of cars. Basically the make cars and make up the industry as a whole at the same time. No wonder they get to rank high for the automobile related keywords.
So, there’s no conspiracy going on. The ranking algo stays pretty much the same with the same SEO techniques, link building still being the most important one. Brands get to rank better simply because they magnet links naturally.
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