Brand queries as a ranking signal?
-
Hi folks,
I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this.
I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this?
Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this...
I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this.
Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would?
Best wishes,
Amelia
PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me
-
I thought pagerank algorithm was largely redundant these days? But good points, thank you!
Yes, I am very interested in universal search.
-
I feel this would detract from Google's entire PageRank algorithm, if they were to base popularity off search query data. Although this would be really hard to test because as the popularity of the brand query grows so will other factors like links and anchor text. It would be really hard to tell what is affecting what.
A related study was done on the impact of brand mentions: http://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions ...But these are not tied to brand query data alone.
Where you might find some interesting insights is how universal search is affected by query popularity. I.e. the influence of news results or in-depth articles as a particular query grows in interest.
-
Phew... I'm not weird!!!
Thanks for your comment, you raise a good point about bad user experience. I'm looking at stuff to improve ours, but tbh it's not that bad... I need to look at our longtail landing pages in better detail, but our main core pages have low bounce rates which I take as being a positive thing.
I used to work for a company that had a subsidiary company that did online videos, the premise for selling the videos to SEO clients was that if people watch a video then bounce rate goes down and dwell time goes up, which is a good thing for rankings... Been thinking about this as an option, but it's expensive to get GOOD videos. (I don't mean over-priced, I mean out of my price range).
Amelia
-
first of all I am glad I am not the only person who thinks about this before sleep (its when I come up with my crazy ideas and thoughts) - tip, have a notebook next to you otherwise you might forget by the morning.
I've never seen any direct correlation between this and I would guess it would be very hard to prove either way, but I would tend to agree.
Google wants to rank sites which are more popular and answer their users experience, so if a lot of people are searching for 'x' and search term. I.e. 'bbc televisions' and someone else did a search for televisions, I wouldn't be surprised to see bbc ranking higher as a lot of people had suddenly been searching for the site. The only caveat I would add would be, that if your site has a poor user experience and a lot of people search brand name an query and bounce, you would probably rank lower.
I have never seen any evidence for this, however its not a silly question / thought.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My site is not ranking at all.
Can anybody check it what is the main culprit behind my website's growth?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anshu14320 -
Ranking fluctuation
Has anybody got any ideas? I have a website that ranks quite well for an industry keyword, the site has a reasonable amount of authority. But the term is fluctuating between position 3 and position 9! It is on a beefy stable server. It is reasonably well optimised from both SEO and speed point of view. It is tracked using Moz RankTracker. I do realise that rankings fluctuate, but this is ridiculous!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman101 -
Cached of live version for ranking
Hello, Is google using the cached version of the live version for ranking a website (if those are different) Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Rankings gone, no WMT errors, help!
Hi, Client Google rankings have been seriously hit. We have done everything we know of to see why this is the case, and there is no obvious explanation. The client dominated search terms, and are no down on page 7/8 for these search terms. There are no errors in WMT, so we can not resubmit for reconsideration. This is a genuine client and their business has been seriously affected. Can anybody offer help? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roadjan0 -
Homepage not ranking in Google AU, but ranking in Google UK?
Hey everyone, My homepage has not been ranking for it's primary keyword in Google Australia for many months now. Yesterday when I was using a UK Proxy and searching via Google UK I found my homepage/primary keyword ranked on page 8 in the UK. Now in Australia my website ranks on page 6 but it's for other pages on my website (and it always changes from different page to page). Previously my page was popping up at the bottom of page 1 and page 2. I've been trying many things and waiting weeks to see if it had any impact for over 4 months but I'm pretty lost for ideas now. Especially after what I saw yesterday in Google UK. I'd be very grateful if someone has had the same experience of suggestions and what I should try doing. I did a small audit on my page and because the site is focused on one product and features the primary keyword I took steps to try and fix the issue. I did the following: I noticed the developer had added H1 tags to many places on the homepage so I removed them all to make sure I wasn't getting an over optimization penalty. Cleaned up some of my links because I was not sure if this was the issue (I've never had a warning within Google webmaster tools) Changed the title tags/h tags on secondary pages not to feature the primary keyword as much Made some pages 'noindex' to try and see if this would take away the emphases on the secondary pages Resubmitted by XML sitemaps to Google Just recently claimed a local listings place in Google (still need to verify) and fixed up citations of my address/phone numbers etc (However it's not a local business - sells Australia wide) Added some new backlinks from AU sites (only a handful though) The only other option I can think of is to replace the name of the product on secondary pages to a different appreciation to make sure that the keyword isn't featured there. Some other notes on the site: When site do a 'site:url' search my homepage comes up at the top The site sometimes ranked for a secondary keyword on the front page in specific locations in Australia (but goes to a localised City page). I've noindexed these as a test to see if something with localisation is messing it around. I do have links from AU but I do have links from .com and wherever else. Any tips, advice, would be fantastic. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdaptDigital0 -
Ranking and Deindexing Issues
Hi We have a website www.advanced-tuning.co.uk which has been suffering since Penguin 2 in terms of SERPS drops and indexing of pages. There are several issues which I believe are impacting on rankings and indexing/ pages being removed from the index. 1) Unnatural links. Been through Cemper and 2% of back links are toxic , 71% suspicious. There has been some auto link building undertaken by previous SEO’ers which has resulted in a lot of very poor quality back links - .pl forum member links etc. I put together a link disavow doc and have now seen Average Link Detox Risk drop to moderate from high. There still a few dodgy links but I’m working my way through these. 2) “thin” content – the site has a lot of auto generated manufacturer / model web pages e.g. http://advanced-tuning.co.uk/model/chevrolet-captiva-2-0-d-vcdi-150/ http://advanced-tuning.co.uk/model/bmw-116i-115/ these pages are internally linked to each other In addition there's a series of geographically targeted web pages which tbh don't seem to have been hit (yet) e.g. http://advanced-tuning.co.uk/location/engine-remapping-huddersfield/ My question is should I; a) Look to remove these manufacturer / model pages completely b) Invest time in generating suitable content for the service /location pages? c) Remove both types of content and concentrate on creating suitable content and links for the top level manufacturer web pages Also If i do remove the manufacturer / model pages is it worth me 301'ing the pages that are still indexed? Thanks in advance, Ade
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Door4seo0 -
Ranking History Reports
I like that every week I can go into my campaign and see how I did. If I want to keep tabs (reports) every week and continuous record keeping how would I do that? For example, I want to see how we did last month on a particular keyword, should I set up to run a report every week for that keyword and have it emailed to me. Is that the only way to do that or does Moz keep previous history somewhere else? Thanks. PS Another website I help out on recently had a huge jump in pageviews this month. I don't track them in SEOMOZ currently is there anyway to figure out where that traffic is coming from? I am guessing perhaps they moved up in Google. Is there a way to see previous history? i.e. they are 33 last month for a certain keyword?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenhornet770 -
GOOGLE Rankings
We built a site for one of our clients about 3 years ago and added Meta tags to each page of the site. But when you do a google search on the keywords the site still does not come up. I thought it would be spidered into the system by now. Web Site - www.specialtysealgroup.com Let me know what we can do to improve our GOOGLE rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thine1230