Dumb SEO Questions

(Entry was posted by Edwin Jonk on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/10/2014).

A nice article discussing (big) brand bias

A nice article discussing (big) brand bias.

Google isn`t biased toward brands:
Google does have a bias toward trust, authority, reputation and high quality, but those things aren’t the exclusive province of brands.

the fact that there are many companies that have invested massively in branding and built large, trusted brands and yet still hire SEOs to improve their visibility in search, I think undermines the point that branding is at the heart of visibility in Google.

Google isn’t looking at brand as a ranking factor at all, as some people seem to think. They’re just looking at the byproducts of a good brand, which should be consumer trust, authority and reputation.

But Google is lenient toward brands:
I have seen a larger brand get access to engineering that smaller brands don’t necessarily get.

If Google looks bad taking you out of the search results — if people who are searching on Google can’t find what they’re looking for and search quality suffers — they would be foolish to take you out of the index for longer than they have to.

One of the claims that Google is biased toward brands, according to MOZ is because the Big Ten increased by ~ 27 % over the last two years to ~ 16 % in search results on the first page.

The problem with MOZ big ten: 1
These are big sites and not necessarily big brands

These sites still don’t appear in search results on the first page for 84% of queries tracked

We don’t know what percentage of these queries is branded to begin with

1 http://mozcast.com/metrics Micah Fisher-Kirshner originally shared:   I like this article by Bryson Meunier, and while it may still be a bit light on data rebuttals with more anecdotes than I prefer, it`s a nice back and forth about being skeptical with what the data shows, particularly with correlations.

#seo #correlations? Quantifying Brand Bias In Search Results With Rand Fishkin of Moz Search Engine Land Like many, I enjoyed Rand Fishkin‘s keynote,  The SEO Revolution Will Not Be Televised,  at SMX West this past March. Rand is a dynamic speaker and a smart marketer; and in my estimation, he deserves most of the attention he gets. That being said, I was taken aback by his claim during the presentation that “the long-awaited dominance …
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    View original question in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/10/2014).