On February 26, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts collected questions on Google Moderator and answered many of them on video.
Monica from Madison, WI asked:
Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on "brands" in search engine rankings? If the answer is "Yes" -- what is Google's definition of a brand?
Related Article :
Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
Originally when we published this we were going to make it subscriber only content, but the change is so important that I thought we should share some of it with the entire SEO industry. This post starts off with a brief history of recent algorithm updates, and shows the enormous weight Google is placing on branded search results.
The Google Florida Update
I got started in the search field in 2003, and one of the things that helped get my name on the map was when I wrote about the November 14th Google Florida update in a cheeky article titled Google Sells Christmas [1]. To this day many are not certain exactly what Google changed back then, but the algorithm update seemed to hit a lot of low level SEO techniques. Many pages that exhibited the following characteristics simply disappeared from the search results
* repetitive inbound anchor text with little diversity
* heavy repetition of the keyword phrase in the page title and on the page
* words is a phrase exhibiting close proximity with few occurrences of the keywords spread apart
* a lack of related/supporting vocabulary in the page copy
The Google Florida update was the first update that made SEO complicated enough to where most people could not figure out how to do it. Before that update all you needed to do was buy and/or trade links with your target keyword in the link anchor text, and after enough repetition you stood a good chance of ranking.
Monica from Madison, WI asked:
Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on "brands" in search engine rankings? If the answer is "Yes" -- what is Google's definition of a brand?
Related Article :
Big Brands? Google Brand Promotion: New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding
Originally when we published this we were going to make it subscriber only content, but the change is so important that I thought we should share some of it with the entire SEO industry. This post starts off with a brief history of recent algorithm updates, and shows the enormous weight Google is placing on branded search results.
The Google Florida Update
I got started in the search field in 2003, and one of the things that helped get my name on the map was when I wrote about the November 14th Google Florida update in a cheeky article titled Google Sells Christmas [1]. To this day many are not certain exactly what Google changed back then, but the algorithm update seemed to hit a lot of low level SEO techniques. Many pages that exhibited the following characteristics simply disappeared from the search results
* repetitive inbound anchor text with little diversity
* heavy repetition of the keyword phrase in the page title and on the page
* words is a phrase exhibiting close proximity with few occurrences of the keywords spread apart
* a lack of related/supporting vocabulary in the page copy
The Google Florida update was the first update that made SEO complicated enough to where most people could not figure out how to do it. Before that update all you needed to do was buy and/or trade links with your target keyword in the link anchor text, and after enough repetition you stood a good chance of ranking.
Read More at www.seobook.com
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