Google has a bias toward brands? So says Aaron Wall in his infographic he wants you all to share:
Many people will believe this because of Aaron Wall’s personal brand, as he was one of the first to expose the closely guarded secrets of SEO to the masses with his SEO book web site, and he writes detailed posts that are sometimes thoughtful even if they’re misguided, which have gained him a reputation and the nickname “The Professor”. He has a loyal following of SEO geeks who are probably upset that I’m even asking this question, but is it true? Does Google search have a bias toward brands?
I work with businesses large and small doing white hat SEO, and some of these engagements over the last ten years were with the biggest brands on the planet: FedEx, Apple, Lowe’s, Groupon, Gatorade, etc. I know the challenges that small businesses face when trying to appear for relevant queries in Google, and I’ve worked with enough large brands in my career to know that large brands have challenges too.
Affiliates Dominate the Organic Listings
If Google favored brands, brands would come up in the search results ahead of affiliate sites a large percentage of the time, no? But have you used Google lately? The results are often filled with small businesses and affiliate sites. Take, for example, the query [deal of the day] or [daily deals]. These are high volume queries that brands large and small would love to rank for, and a lot of them have content that is relevant to the query, but only one large brand appears in the search results for [deal of the day] (Amazon), and only two well-known brands appear for the query [daily deals] (Target, eBay). Groupon or LivingSocial are some of the hottest brands in the daily deal space, but they don’t show up for the terms. Who does? Affiliates, mostly; and small businesses with exact match domains and content that’s highly targeted to that query.
How about Black Friday? It’s coming up in a few days, and Walmart and Target are spending millions to get people in the stores and online to entice consumers to buy with them. Yet, most searches for black Friday terms are dominated by affiliates, and Walmart and Target are nowhere to be found. If trends are any indication, it looks to be bigger this year in the US than ever before, and many brands with Black Friday sales would love to appear for this query. But Google doesn’t show brands at all.
Thanksgiving is in a few days, and cranberry sauce is currently number 20 on Google’s Hot Trends at the time of writing. When you look at the results, SEMRush shows that the first result is not a major brand, but SimplyRecipes.com, which is owned by one woman in California.
The first five results, in fact, are not large brands, but advertising-driven publishers: simplyrecipes.com and allrecipes.com.
Searchers won’t generally look past the first five results, but if we do we see that smaller brands make up 60% of the top 20 listings, according to SEMRush.
Another of the hot trends queries this week, [green bean casserole], has a branded website as the first result– CampbellKitchen.com, a site owned by Campbell’s Soup Company that showcases related brands. But if we look at that site compared to SimplyRecipes.com, it’s clear that SimplyRecipes.com– the affiliate site– is the more powerful domain:
Click to enlarge image of organic strength of Simply Recipes versus Campbell's Kitchen
You can see Simply Recipes is clearly the smaller of the two brands, as the search volume for its brand terms is a little over 21,000 searches per month, while Campbell’s Kitchen brand terms get over 790,000 searches per month. In spite of that, Simply Recipes shows on more than twice as many non-brand keywords with 15x the search volume. According to comScore, this gives Simply Recipes (the affiliate site) about 13x the organic traffic of the brand site Campbell’s Kitchen.
Tell me again how Google loves brands?
What is a Brand, Exactly?
One problem with the Google loves brands theory is that one’s definition of brand could include these smaller brands like Simply Recipes. They’re definitely not a large brand, as they’re not listed in lists of the top 100 global brands, and it’s unlikely that most searchers are aware of Simply Recipes before their first visit to the site. In terms of navigational search volume, which is how search engines can determine brand strength, Campbell’s brands are much stronger than Simply Recipes in terms of brand recognition and search volume, but Simply Recipes still has 21,000 searches per month, and it could be argued is still a brand. However, where do you draw the line? How would Google, in Aaron Wall’s theory, determine what a brand is in order to give it preferential treatment? It would almost have to be in terms of navigational search volume, and in this case the opposite of Wall’s theory occurs: lesser brands get more traffic from Google. Does it matter if it is a brand with search volume if the search volume is so much less than a brand that it’s trouncing in the search results? At some point it becomes impossible to prove or disprove the theory, as any web site with a name could constitute a “brand”; and of course that includes just about all of them.
Still, I keep running into situations in the search results where large brands are getting trounced by affiliate sites for high volume competitive informational, non-brand keywords, and I wonder how many instances like these I can demonstrate before it’s clear to everyone that Google doesn’t give brands more visibility in search results than affiliate sites.
Google as Democratic Enabler
In the comments of the post Aaron Wall says that this theory isn’t about brands appearing in the organic search results 100% of the time, but appearing in the six other places on the SERP he mentions at the close of the infographic. But really, anyone with a local business, a paid search budget (however small) or a shopping feed can appear in any of these slots. What do these have to do with brands?
And visibility in search suggest and on the search results query refinements is about search volume, not about brands, per se. People search for brands because brands spend millions promoting their wares, and create demand. Google sees the search volume around brands and common keywords and wants to give people what they’re asking for faster. That’s why they also list types and stores in the search refinements. People search by stores, types and brands for certain general queries, and Google includes quick links to these queries to get users to the results they’re looking for faster. It’s not a conspiracy against affiliates. It’s a search engine creating a better product that serves its users better.
There’s a reason Google released the Panda on the SEO community: because they were getting killed in the press for providing low quality results. When sites come up that don’t match a searcher’s intent, and don’t solve that searcher’s problem, Google fails at its job and runs the risk of having its users defect to Bing, Blekko, Facebook, Twitter, or some other source of relevant information. Users search for brands, and Google is giving them what they’re searching for. It’s really as simple as that.
Enterprise SEO Challenges
What Wall’s infographic doesn’t get into is how difficult it is for brands to appear in search results because they’re frequently shooting themselves in the foot. Affiliates often have an advantage over large brands because they can move faster and implement at will. In large organizations promoting large brands it can often take months to change website copy because it has to go through multiple departments and stakeholders in order to get implemented, and sometimes positive change on a website is overridden because of turnover or another department with another initiative and no knowledge of the positive change that has occurred. I once had a client with more than 100,000 authoritative links being prevented from passing link equity because of a temporary redirect and no one to care. Small brands don’t have these problems. It’s common in enterprise SEO to have to come in after a redesign in which the entire site was designed in Flash or AJAX and go through months of education and project management in order to get the site indexed again, let alone returned in search results for relevant keywords. Affiliates may have problems with Panda or generating link equity, but large brands have issues of their own. Even if Google wanted to move every large brand to the front of the search results (which they obviously don’t, given the results I’m seeing), many big brands would be making it difficult for them to do that by splitting their link equity a thousand different ways and accidentally removing their sites from the index.
If you don’t represent a large brand and you want search visibility, don’t cry about it with infographics about how evil Google is for doing their jobs. Do what Wall did back in 2004 and align your brand with something people are searching for that you sell. I’ve been doing SEO long enough where I remember seeing Aaron Wall do his own branding by buying paid search ads for queries he wasn’t ranking on in 2004 when no one really knew who he was. But because SEO was new and one of the top queries at the time related to SEO was [seo book], Wall was savvy enough to make it his brand. Large brands spend millions on advertising to create or stimulate demand, but if you align your brand with a keyword that already has demand, the playing field is leveled.
Bottom line is, brands have problems, just as affiliates do. They’re just different problems. If you’re an affiliate marketer, stop wasting your time complaining and move quickly and experiment, because many large brands, for whatever advantages they may or may not have in search, will almost always be at a disadvantage there.
I tweeted in reply to this, but wanted to expound a bit before I moved on. To keep it short, brands have an insane amount of equity that (most of them) simply don’t understand how to leverage properly in the SERPs and social media. Google gives a brand every reason to rank, dominate, and crush it for related mentions, and it’s only because affiliates out hustle them to the top spots that you see them there.
To put it another way, affiliates hit on all cylinders. If you were comparing there on page and off page signals, affiliates usually know SEO so much better that they can flood their content with enough fake brand signals, that they outrank the actually brand which is giving out weak signals in their content, rich media, markup, etc.
Good discussion, but pointless moving forward IMO. Google prefers brands.
Keith, this isn’t a question of spam versus brands, it’s a question of affiliates versus brands. Obviously Google would like to keep spam out of their index, but it doesn’t follow that they would like to keep affiliates out. Google, after all, has their own affiliate network, and wouldn’t exist without brands and affiliates who use AdWords and AdSense, which is what monetizes search and most other Google products. As I demonstrated in my post, there are affiliates like SimplyRecipes.com that create relevant content, don’t appear to violate Google’s webmaster guidelines intentionally and outrank major brands in the process. My logic does not equate affiliates with spammers, so your assertion does not follow. Many affiliates (and brands) are spammers, clearly, and Google should do a better job of removing content that people aren’t looking for if they want to remain relevant in an increasingly competitive market, but some affiliates are legitimate marketers creating sustainable revenue. And if it’s in Google’s search results and they don’t endorse it, then their product is failing the user until the next major update.
I also fundamentally disagree with your characterization of using fake brand signals or other blackhat tactics as SEO. Good SEOs can rank without cheating and becoming spammers. I’ve outranked many big brands for competitive non-brand keywords in my career just by creating hyper-relevant content that Google finds relevant to the query, often doing it without the benefit of link equity. Some affiliates can do things that big brands can’t (like create microsites at exact match domains, test and fail quickly, or add a lot of relevant text to a page) , so affiliates can compete in my experience without cheating and resorting to spam. But if you’re not playing the game according to the established rules for sustainable SEO, then what you’re calling SEO is no more SEO to me than Barry Bonds is a good baseball player, or the best wig outlet email that somehow made it to my inbox this morning that I promptly marked as spam is email marketing.
Also, you’re wrong about brands’ SEO problems simply being the result of a lack of SEO understanding. Often these enterprise organizations pay top dollar for in-house SEOs vets like Dan Perry, or on the agency side people like us at Resolution Media or Todd Friesen at Performics. These people are SEO experts and veteran SEOs, but they are not the only expert voices in the organizations they’re advocating for SEO in. Often design, legal, branding or other departments fight to retain content that is not SEO friendly, and SEO suffers as a result. Knowledge has nothing to do with it. Enterprise SEO that is implemented is as much about communication and evangelizing SEO as it is about knowledge. But expert SEO knowledge is table stakes.
In fact, I would even argue that but if you’re an affiliate or brand and you’re resorting to high-risk short term tactics to rank in Google, you’re the one with the knowledge gap. As I said, good SEOs know enough to rank without cheating. If you can’t do that, then maybe you need to try harder, or find a sustainable source of income in another field.
Thanks for your comments. We may be too far apart to come together on this, but I do appreciate the discussion.
“But really, anyone with a local business, a paid search budget (however small) or a shopping feed can appear in any of these slots. What do these have to do with brands?”
Well no, we (affiliates) all got banned from Adwords so we are forced to be very aggressive chasing the little real estate that is left for organic results in the Google SERPs. While I’ll gladly admit in participating in this escalated aggressiveness, I don’t think it will end well for us in the long term when the organic results comes under scrutiny again.
With organic real estate quickly evaporating and click costs rise (which will happen) brands will dominate…I think that’s where Aaron is going.
Good post though.
Thanks for your response. Unless you’re a data entry affiliate, affiliates are able to use AdWords. If you got banned for violating Google’s policies then this issue isn’t really about affiliates, per se, but affiliates who violate Google’s guidelines in order to turn a profit. In other words it’s a spam versus Google issue, and that could apply to affiliates or brands. Affiliates can still participate in AdWords, and savvy affiliates should be able to find a way to compete. I appreciate the feedback.
This is a thoughtful blog post, however, you offer little supporting evidence. I’m always interested in the contrarian opinion.
I would like to point out that most of these examples are anecdotal. In order to do real analysis, one would need to come up with a variety of search phrases: short and long tail, commercial and non-commercial, informational, etc.
Once you’ve come up with a list of search phrases, you should note the top 10 results for each friend, categorizing them as a
1) brand
2) affiliate
3) small business
4) small publisher
5) spam
and so on…
Until somebody provides this kind of analysis, anything they say/write on the matter is nothing more than a short-sighted opinion.
Two interesting observations I made from your sample queries:
1 – 50% or more of the sites are poor quality.
2 – Google places way too much emphasis on domain matching.
Thanks, Jeremy. Aaron offered historical evidence of algorithm changes and employee sound bytes, and nothing like the comprehensive scientific analysis you’re suggesting is necessary to properly study this phenomenon. So I’m going to assume that you don’t agree with his analysis any more than you agree with mine? Or perhaps I should assume that you’re leaning toward my analysis, since Wall’s offered no specific query analysis, which you say is necessary for proving or disproving this hypothesis? At any rate, the idea for the post was not to provide a comprehensive scientific analysis to counter his infographic, but simply to provide some analysis of the actual search results where none was previously provided.
That said, I did do this type of analysis that you suggest for five queries, plus an analysis of the organic ranking potential of one large affiliate versus one large brand, which looks indirectly at thousands of queries, so I thought my sample was large enough to worth mentioning as counter evidence to Aaron’s infographic and a reason to follow up with further research. You’re kind of vague in your requirements above, though. Can you clarify how many queries, what type of queries (both in terms of intent and category), what constitutes a brand vs affiliate, what constitutes a small business (is it in terms of revenue, headcount, business model, etc), and what is done when there’s overlap (e.g. a brand or an affiliate who spams)? Also, why the top ten results and not the top three or five? Most of the visibility in Google is above the fold, so examining the top ten results is probably unnecessary. Of course I want to avoid hasty generalizations, so we need to make sure our methodology is sound and our sample size large enough to be significant from the outset.
Are you volunteering to do this research then? I could take it on myself, but I’m guessing you would say that I’m not an objective researcher since I’ve already stated that I think Wall’s theory isn’t based in reality. And it does seem, still, from the initial research that that is the case, although further study could, admittedly, indicate something else entirely.
Thanks, of course, for your comments. I really do enjoy the discussion.
*friend = query. I should have proofed the comment better before I hit submit.
Thanks for the thoughtful blog post. I completely appreciate it. I wish more people would do such work, and help establish their personal brands 🙂
I suspect however you may have a bias. A “blindness” created by your white hat work for big brands. The most pressing issues for you (as an SEO) in that environment are not the same “most pressing issues” for independent SEOs.
When you boil it down to a profession, SEO is about strategy and execution. You admit yourself, that your “organization” lacks those very things… you push hard to get them to accept and engage in strategic thinking, and you push hard to get them to execute. But those are things they don’t do well. At least not natively, and often even with your best efforts.
And then you suggest the system (web marketing) is unfair (biased away from those entities you work with) and use that as a leverage point to counter Aaron’s representation of the Google brand bias.
I suggest you step away from the work environment with all of its pressures and priorities, and spend a solid month on an independent SEO project (perhaps an affiliate deal with one of those brands?). I think you’ll change your tune, but I also think you’ll come out a better SEO (even though I have no bearing on how good your SEO is… not intending to judge you here).
The web was not “created” for brands. It creates brands, but I think that’s a side effect. It’s a communications tool. If your organizational teams adopt it as a communications medium, instead of a marketing channel, they might realize that:
1. their current methods of marketing to the Internet are sub-optimal
2. their operational organizational structure is sub-optimal (for that work)
3. their expectations are not optimally aligned with the way the Internet is being used by the people (business or consumer)
4. You personally are worth a lot more than they are currently paying you
Thanks again for the conversation. I hope it continues, because it adds value for all of us. And please don’t take anything I said too personally… I don’t work inside big organizations, so I am not all that sensitive to the way people like you (people who navigate group meetings and internal politics) hear the sort of direct-speak I’m used to using with my independent SEO colleagues.
john andrews
independent full time web strategist and SEO consultant
SEO since 1997, full time since 2003
John, thank you for your thoughtful response. I appreciate it. I wasn’t expecting much from SEOBook readers, honestly, based on their response to a similar objection I had to Wall’s Vince update theories back in 2009; but I was pleasantly surprised here. Comments generally avoided ad hominem attacks, and some of them, such as yours, were honestly thoughtful and sincere. Thanks.
That said, I’m afraid I was unclear if I gave you the impression that I only work with big brands that have difficulty implementing. In fact, in my 11 years as a salaried internet marketer and 8 years as a dedicated SEO I’ve worked with about every type of client imaginable: large brands, small brands, affiliates (though not spammers in either brand or affiliate case) and nonprofits. These days I onlywork directly with one client– a midsize manufacturer with a brand that’s not quite a household name, as most of my time is spent evolving the firm’s SEO product, managing and training the other 20+ SEOs in the department, doing quality assurance and coordinating new business. But I have worked with a variety of clients, and not just big brands.
And honestly, I haven’t found this brand bias even with my smaller clients. We did a small project recently for a car image sharing site and saw a 511% increase in impressions and 1233% increase in clicks from non-brand organic search traffic in the first month, just from doing the same kinds of things we would do for larger brands who have much more link equity. I also have a few white hat affiliate sites that I use for testing and routinely am able to outrank much more credible domains, simply by having highly relevant content to the queries.
So I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written. I just think you may have overestimated my brand bias, because I have found success with brands and sites of all types. This may have been my fault, so I apologize if I wasn’t clear.
Just curious, though, if you’d like to respond, I’d love to hear some of your criticism to the specific points I mentioned in the argument. If I did, theoretically, have a brand bias, would that make the search results that I presented have fewer affiliate results? Would that have made the affiliate site I presented less powerful? Seems to me that’s more objective than subjective. Also, how do you define “brand”, exactly, as I’ve found many sites that are affiliates, but also brands. If I have a bias, it’s definitely to get the opinions of veterans in the field, so if you’d like to give me your take on the data I’d love to hear it.
You make no sense
You use an example and assume that all is like that
You use “Have you seen the SERPS lately…”
You seem to forget that an aff page is better many times for the USER due to discounts, comparisons with competitors etc.
You seem to be more Catholic than the Pope. Google said that they have a brand bias, you say no.
“Thanksgiving,” you’re a coward for not using your real name to criticize me, and you accuse me of making no sense when your comments make you sound like a drunk American stealing away from their family on Thanksgiving. Too bad for you your IP address is in the Netherlands.
As I explain below to Jeremy, who also suggested I’m making a hasty generalization, I use more specific examples than Wall did in his infographic, which I thought was significant enough to show reasonable doubt and warrant further research be done before anyone subscribes to the “Google loves brands” theory. I’m not proposing the theory, I’m demonstrating why it’s potentially flawed. In American courts of law the burden of proof is on the prosecution, not the defense. Blog posts here are not held to such strict standards, but I’m doing more than most.
“Have you seen the SERPs lately” was a rhetorical device used to make a point. I used hyperbole to demonstrate the absurdity of proposing a theory without providing evidence of altered ranking in the search results. Since this was a blog post and not a peer reviewed article in a medical journal, this rhetorical device should be acceptable to most of my audience.
I didn’t forget any of those things about an affiliate page. In fact, I’m saying that affiliates often can rank higher than brands legitimately, and I use an example (SimplyRecipes.com) to demonstrate that. Not sure where you’re coming from here. Perhaps something was lost in translation.
My religion is immaterial here, but when someone says you’re Catholic here in America it’s usually a synonym for dogmatic or guilt-ridden. I assume you mean the former here, but it’s hard to tell, as I’m actually providing the dissenting opinion, not the dogma. So to use your metaphor I suppose I would be more of a Lutheran (though I’m not). And Google didn’t say they have a brand bias. Wall quoted two of Google’s more than 20,000 employees and attributed it to Google. This is problematic because Matt Cutts who is quoted says very explicitly elsewhere that Google (or at least the search ranking team) doesn’t think in terms of brands, and because Google is a huge organization without a central hub of communication, and their employees sometimes contradict each other on certain issues. So you don’t have to be a believer to find fault with this particular theory.
If you can attempt to be more clear in your response, I would welcome it. I do enjoy the discussion.
@Bryson I think your examples don’t fit the discussion, actually. Queries like [green bean casserole] are not specific enough without context… bad examples for SEO research.
Recipe sites, which you note are not brands, are very specific and highly-relevant. I would expect AllRecipes.com for example, to outrank most major brands, for the food they sell (depending on the specific query).
The query [cranberry sauce] is another great example of what is not a good example for an SEO discussion. It reminds me of a discussion I once had at dinner with one of the biggest SEOs in the world.
He noted that the Google results for “hammer” were all MC Hammer, without a Home Depot or Sears in site. He couldn’t believe Google would present a SERP for “hammer” that didn’t rank these famous, top hardware stores (brands) in the top 5. He wasn’t asking why this was, from an SEO perspective. He was laughing at how bad Google was. His SEO arrogance had blinded him, I think.
Seriously… who searches the Internet to buy a hammer? And of the very few who might, how many Google the term “hammer” to find one? In this case, I have no doubt Google was way smarter than the SEO.
Ditto for “cranberry sauce”. Who Google’s that, to find out where to buy cranberry sauce? No one. Now I am sure plenty of people Google that to learn about cranberry sauce, learn to make cranberry sauce, etc.
Smart SEO’s moved away from KW SEO years ago, and started developing content around the consumer experience with [product]. These are perfect examples. Big Brands won’t rank for these queries unless they deliver what the searchers want… and it’s not a link to a big brand page promoting the product.
I think the argument above is too far off to make for a good SEO discussion.
John, it’s not a discussion if you don’t contribute. If my examples are bad, then give me examples of queries that you think are appropriate for the discussion and we’ll test those queries. Aaron Wall posed the same criticism but proposed the insurance vertical as a more appropriate testing ground. Sure enough, when I looked at insurance it was clear that both affiliates and big brands were well represented. As I said to Jeremy above, this post was meant to poke holes in an existing theory, not posit a new theory, so I didn’t feel it necessary to do a comprehensive query study to cast a reasonable doubt. But if you want to see it, let’s find a methodology that’s scientific and fair and get it started.
Also, as I said to Jeremy, if you do believe that comprehensive, objective query analysis is necessary to prove or disprove this theory that should mean that you don’t believe Wall’s original premise, as no query analysis was presented. It’s hard to get to the truth of the matter here when proponents are arguing for something based on a gut feeling but require comprehensive query analysis to disprove the theory that was never proven in the first place. I get the sense from discussions over the past couple of days that it may not be possible to convince any of you of my position with evidence because you came to it from faith.
Wall and I had this discussion about appropriate keywords Monday and I addressed the cranberry sauce recipes keyword in the comments of his post. You’re looking at it from an affiliate marketer direct response perspective, which is not the only perspective that marketers have. Brand managers at big companies have seen compelling evidence such as the Enquiro/Mediative study on brand impact in search results a few years ago and have since seen success using search as a branding channel. It’s a different model than yours, but brand marketers are doing it and seeing success, judging by the number of brand advertisers on keywords like [sports drink], [hair gel], [toothbrush], [recipes], etc.
But again, if you think other keywords are necessary for this study to be compelling, tell me which ones and why and we can start creating a methodology and a test. As it is only one of us is working to uncover the truth, because the other is assuming on faith that he knows it.
Your hammer example is not appropriate at all, though. I actually used a similarly ambiguous query in the comments of Wall’s post to show that Google uses related queries for ambiguous queries to justify the quick links for brands, stores and types at the top, because they’re trying to get at intent of the query without being able to ask the searcher. Wall ignored it, of course, as he did every other aspect of his theory that I shot down with evidence. But of course I know that there are certain queries like bass, jaguar, and hammer that are ambiguous, and the searcher could be looking for some other meaning that the word has.
But what about [hammers]? If someone puts [hammers] into a search engine (and globally it happens 8,100 times per month in Google, in spite of your assertion that no one searches for hammers in Google), Google shows content related to hammers on the first page, because the query is less ambiguous. But it’s also non-branded so the searcher doesn’t appear to be looking for hammers from any one source. So how is this page more relevant than a page on Lowes.com that has information related to various hammers, all of which you can buy on the site (and people do, btw). This page and the hammer source (#4 in Google for [hammers]) lead to sites (non-brand) where you can buy hammers, just like Lowes.com or HomeDepot.com, but Google is ranking the small business ahead of the big box stores. The query isn’t that ambiguous, as Google is showing places related to hammers, the tools, but they’re not showing big brands ahead of small businesses, in spite of this cockamamie theory that all of Wall’s followers seem to believe on faith.
At any rate, thanks for your comments. I’m no longer expecting you or Wall to address the mountain of evidence against this theory that I’ve now produced, but if you would like to it couldn’t hurt your credibility.
I less agree with you and more agree with Aaron Wall in his infographic that illustrates Google’s love for brands is higher than smaller ones. The reason is that Google has data that definitely shows the budget spent by brands versus non-brands. In an attempt to discourage non-brands, Google has deployed technique to lure smaller businesses for adwords. Big brands do business regardless of search results. Its only smaller business that bank upon Google for t heir business. Favoring brands on organic search by Google is a master plan to have goose producing more golden eggs. I have already written my post on the same!