Why Google doesn’t require big brands to optimize their sites in order to land on page one, and what it means for smaller companies
Remember back in October, when Eric Schmidt of Google told a room full of magazine publishers that the “Internet is a cesspool”? Well, he wasn’t just being funny. Over the past couple months, he’s begun a clean-up mission that involves moving big brands to the top of Google search results.
Google has started to favor big brands, primarily effecting the most competitive, high-value keywords.
If you’re a large publisher, that could be great news for you. If you’re a smaller publisher, it means you need to start working really hard on building your reputation, inbound links and overall popularity. Sounds like a clique doesn’t it?
For example, when the new strategy took effect on January 18th, sites like LendingTree.com, WellsFargo.com and CountryWide.com jumped ranks to page one for the keyword “mortgage”. They didn’t optimize their sites any better, target keywords or write better copy. In fact, they didn’t make any changes to their sites, they just jumped up based on reputation.
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Search Engine News notes:
“What we’re seeing here is the introduction of a significant new ranking factor. Although incoming links, on-page keyword placement and a great domain name remain a big factor in the rankings game, a well-recognized brand is now clearly playing a huge role as well—particularly for those most-competitive keywords.
Linkbait, viral marketing, and social media play a huge role in sending signals to Google about how popular your site is. Nearly every successful viral marketing campaign that receives a huge influx of traffic is accompanied by a site-wide boost in rankings for many of our most valuable keywords. Why? Because Google is tracking where people go, and if you’re getting a lot of visitors Google knows it.
Clearly, if you’re a small-to-medium business, your most affordable marketing options are social media and viral marketing campaigns. By creating great content and promoting it via social media you can compete with some pretty deep pockets in the big media ad world—without spending millions on advertising.”
The question is… how far does this go? How many brands will Google select going forward for every big keyword? How will companies build reputation, when Google is hand-picking a clique for every keyword and limiting the exposure of smaller companies? What do you think?
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It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place.
Thanks, Amanda.
The criteria is more or less “household names” for the time being. Big online brands, just as well as offline brands.
Right now it’s about single keywords, ones that smaller publishers are less likely to be ranked on anyhow, which is why we try to target two and three keyword phrases.
Still, as Google expands that list, it makes you wonder whether or not big brands will one day make it impossible for smaller companies to land on page one via good old fashioned SEO. For one-word keywords at least.
Only big companies? Or anyone whose brand has become well-known on the web? What are the criteria being used?
Because if it’s only big companies, there’s little point the little guy trying. But if not only big companies, perhaps branding needs to take precedence over SEO.