Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?

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>> CUTTS: Hey, so we posted at 8:00 AM if anybody wanted to put some questions online.

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And it's 11:00 AM, and we have 114 questions in three hours. So let's try looking at a

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few of this. The first question is, "Can you verify that Google is putting more weight

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on "brands" in search engine rankings? If the answer is "Yes"--what is the definition--Google's

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definition of a brand?" And that's inspired by Aaron Wall's recent blog post. That comes

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from Monica in Madison, Wisconsin. So I'll try to give a pretty complete answer to this.

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I was planning on talking about it a little bit more at PubCon in Austin in just a couple

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of weeks. But, you know, inside of Google at least within the search ranking team, we

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don't really think about brands. We think about words like trust, authority, reputation,

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page rank, high quality. And so the Google philosophy on search results has been the

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same pretty much forever. It's that if somebody comes to Google and types an X, we want to

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return high quality information about X. And sometimes that's a brand search, sometimes

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that's an informational search, sometimes it's navigational, sometimes it's transactional,

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so they're all sorts of different information needs that people have. I wouldn't--so first

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off, yes, Google has made a change in our rankings. It's one of over three or four hundred

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changes that we make every year. So I wouldn't call this as an update, you know, I would

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call it just a simple change. One of the--if you have to refer to it, one of the people

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that did a lot of work on it, his name was Vince. And so, you know, this particular change,

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we talk about it as being sort of Vince's change within the Googleplex. So I wouldn't

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really call it an update, but I would say that there has been at least a change in how

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we do some rankings. It doesn't affect the vast majority of queries, it's more likely,

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and most people haven't even noticed it. I mean Aaron talked about it. And I think even

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before that, people on Webmaster were talking about it. But it affects a relatively small

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number of queries. It's not like it affects a ton of long tail queries or anything like

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that. I don't think of it as putting more weight on brands. Like, we really don't think

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about brands and search quality that much. For example, if you type Eclipse, if Google

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were really focused on brands, we might return Mitsubishi Eclipse, you know, at number one

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or something like that. And if you actually go to Google and type in Eclipse, we've got

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eclipse.org, you know, because there's a development environment. We've got NASA's Eclipse website.

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And then there are some commercial results. For example, Eclipse is the name of that book

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in the Twilight series, so we've got a page from Amazon. But it's not that we try to always

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return brands, we try to return whatever we think the best results are for users. So the

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net update, the net upshot of this change is pretty simple, you know. We try to return

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high quality results. We think a lot about trust, reputation, authority, page rank. And

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so what you should be doing doesn't change. Try to make a great site, try to make it the

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site that is so fantastic that you've sort of become known as an authority in your niche.

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And it doesn't have to be a big niche. It doesn't have to be, you know, a huge well-known

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keyword, it can be a smaller niche. And if you're still the expert, that's the sort of

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thing that people are going to want to link to that they'll talk about, the sort of things

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that people would really enjoy. And those are the sort of sites, the experts that we

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want to bring back.