We are still seeing the new brand focused results in a couple of verticals.  What is still a mystery is how Google is determining that these brands should be in the top 10.  In our laptop example, Apple ranking in the top 10, yet the Apple site does not even have the word “laptop” in their homepage anywhere, or in their title tag.  We see this on other sites and other verticals.  So even if Google is weighting their sites higher based on higher value links regardless of anchor text, or based on the fact that they are a publicly traded company, or traffic, or whatever other factor—HOW DOES THE GOOGLEBOT KNOW THIS SITE HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH LAPTOPS?

This very well may be a manual manipulation of results, which also doesn’t make sense since several big brand names are missing from the results still.

These new results, if they stick, mean that large established brands do not have to do SEO, do not have to follow Google’s ever complicated rules about new fresh content, about minimizing flash, about proper tags, about duplicate content. They do not have to spend any money or time on SEO like the rest of the world.  It is frustrating enough for webmasters that they cannot simply make a useful site for their business, they must hire an SEO who knows what is right/wrong, or spend hours a week keeping up with the guidelines.  Now companies that are not even their direct competitors will outrank them without doing any SEO at all.

And the user is show results that they may not have even been looking for.

Tags: google algorithm update, google ranking changes, google serp changes

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 11:45 am and is filed under Searcn Engine Ranking, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.