Does Google Favor Brands?

DOES GOOGLE FAVOR BRANDS? AN IN-DEPTH LOOK Bryson Meunier Director, Content Solutions Resolution Media 2/28/2012

AGENDA
The Arguments For
The Evidence Against
Four Takeaways

THE ARGUMENTS FOR
Google admits it
Brands rank above non-brands routinely in Google
There are many places for brands in search results
http://www.seobook.com/brands

HASTY GENERALIZATION Cartoon originally copyrighted by the authors; G. Renee Guzlas, artist

THE EVIDENCE AGAINST
Does Google Favor Brands?

RESULTS ARE ATYPICAL
Only 7 queries studied in Aaron Wall’s original brand study
[daily deals] [recipes] [new york hotels] [credit cards] [music downloads]

Keyword-based rather than organic traffic based

RESULTS CAN’T BE DUPLICATED
54% of the domains in Aaron Wall’s original brand study are no longer ranking

NO CLEAR BRAND BIAS IN DATA PRESENTED
If you look only at OEMs vs store brands, only 40% of the domains in Aaron Wall’s query study are brands
If you segment it by store and OEM brands, 54% are brands and 46% are small brands or SMBs
Almost half of the queries presented are either deadlocked or have a majority of non-brands ranking today

ANALYSIS OF TOP SITES SHOWS OTHERWISE
61% of top 100 SEMRush domains are not companies in the Fortune 500.
91% of top domains are not top 100 global brands
89% are not associated with the top 10 AdWords advertisers, and 30% of them don’t even buy AdWords
Download the Whitepaper at http://www.BrysonMeunier.com/Brands

ANALYSIS OF TOP BRANDS SHOWS OTHERWISE
Only 9 of the top 100 brands were also listed in SEMRush’s top 100 domains (9% of total): Yahoo! (#3), Google (#4), Amazon.com (#5), Apple (#8), eBay (#11), Microsoft (#16), Disney (#45), Adobe (#74) and MTV (#87).
Only 36 of the top 100 brands were within the first 1000 domains of SEMRush’s ranked list (3% of total).
The range for the rank of the top 100 global brands was #3 for Yahoo! to #251,000 for Nescafe.
The average SEMRush rank for the world’s top brands is 13,874 with a median of 1,900.
The world’s top brand, Coca Cola, fared worse than many brands below it, with a rank of 3,800. And Coca Cola has employed a full-time SEO agency for years.
http://www.interbrand.com/en/best-global-brands/best-global-brands-2008/best-global-brands-2011.aspx Download the Whitepaper at http://www.BrysonMeunier.com/Brands

Car image sharing startup site went from 12,000 images indexed to 403,000 in six months
Monthly organic visits (the brand’s primary goal metric) grew 4198.61% from 1,083 to 46,554 in six months
Organic search went from 11% of total visits to 41% of total visits in six months
Small brands/businesses can still succeed in organic search with white hat SEO

ENTERPRISE SEOS HAVE UNIQUE CHALLENGES
Legal
Conflicting departmental standards/politics
Lost knowledge due to turnover
Design and development teams with no knowledge of SEO
Executives with no understanding of SEO and no buy-in

QUOTES TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT
"Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.
We don't actually want you to be successful. The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance.”
Eric Schmidt, then Google CEO, addressing publishers and editors on October 8, 2008
http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/google-s-schmidt-internet-cesspool-brands/131569/

RELATED LINKS AND SUGGESTIONS ARE USER DRIVEN "Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component." - Eric Schmidt http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/google-s-schmidt-internet-cesspool-brands/131569/ http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=watches&geo=US&date=today%2012-m&cmpt=q

“ And we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side.
-Matt Cutts, “ TED 2011: The ‘Panda’ That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google’s Top Search Engineers
Wired, March 3, 2011
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-farms/all/1
And you can really see mathematical reasons.”

Times “brand” mentioned in the interview:
Zero

“ But you know inside of Google, at least within the search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands. 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 an 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 transactional, so there are all sorts of different information needs that people have.”
-Matt Cutts, “ Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?”, March 4, 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMfWPWUh5uU&feature=youtu.be&t=45s

BRAND VS. QUALITY AND AUTHORITY
Wikipedia is the top result in the SEMRush top sites list, with 3x the organic traffic of the number 2 listing, Facebook. Wikipedia also appears for more keywords than any other site on the Internet.
Wikipedia is operated by a non-profit called Wikimedia with 80 employees and $24.7 million in revenue ($6 million minus costs) for 2011.

BRAND VS. QUALITY AND AUTHORITY The #500 company on the Fortune 500 had revenues 177 times larger than Wikimedia Foundation in 2011.

FOUR TAKEAWAYS…
Does Google Favor Brands?

1. AFFILIATES AND SMALL BUSINESSES CAN COMPETE IN GOOGLE SEARCH
Move quickly.
Build your brand, but focus on trust, authority and quality
Make your brand something searchers are already looking for
Use ranking factors large brands won’t.
Work on your business model.

2. BIG BRANDS ARE NOT ALWAYS WINNING
Don’t get complacent
Staff appropriately
Use words people are searching for
Don’t handicap your site
Make SEO a priority from the CEO

3. KILL YOUR SEO IDOLS
Not literally
Argument from authority is a logical fallacy
Hold SEO experts to the high standards that got them where they are

4. GIVE GOOGLE A BREAK
No one in this room would have a job without Google
They are a large company with many stakeholders and still manage to focus on user experience in search results

Bryson Meunier
Director, Content Solutions
Resolution Media
[email_address]
http://www.brysonmeunier.com
http://www.resolutionmedia.com
@brysonmeunier
THANK YOU! Scan to visit m.brysonmeunier.com

Does Google Favor Brands?

by Bryson Meunier on Mar 01, 2012

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