No matter how big or small your website is, and no matter what domain name you decide to develop, there is one certainty… Google will play a major role in the success of your website. Google’s algorithms are constantly adjusted slightly (or not so slightly) in Google’s effort to provide visitors with the most accurate and meaningful search results. As a result of their adjustments, web developers must adapt in order to keep their sites ranking well.
As Aaron Wall blogged about on Wednesday, Google made another adjustment, which seems to favor established brands in search results. Aaron is a well know SEO expert, and I use some of his tools for research purposes – both in development and even in domain acquisition strategy. He offers some interesting observations about Google’s latest adjustment and how it has impacted brands online.
Likewise, Mannix Marketing also offered some good information about Google’s adjustment as well as a history of past changes and the impact that it had on websites. Mannix Marketing are real pros when it comes to web development and SEO, as can be seen by some of their websites, including Albany.com, LakeGeorge.com and Saratoga.com.
I believe that if you build a website with valuable information on a category defining domain name, you become one of the brand leaders by default, and the more you continue to update with good information, the more trusted your site will become.
Mannix is smart offering seo services on their geo sites to their advertisers for their own websites. As YP fades, this becomes more important and for geo owners an easy referral to a third party to fulfill.
“there is one certainty… Google will play a major role in the success of your website.”
In many or most cases this is true.
However, it’s not a certainty if you use other methods to draw people to your site.
There are many other methods other than having a high rank in google.
You’ve used the word ‘google’ a lot in this short post Eliott.
6-7 times..
are you trying to please the google ‘bots’ ? 😉
@Belshass
I wish it was that easy.
While you need to keep in mind the fact that Google may change, it’s important to focus on having good content and quality links, as opposed to trying to take advantage of Google’s every tweak.
Very true. I think if you build a quality, visually appealing website with content that people are after you will do well. People will naturally want to view your site and recommend to others so backlinks will be naturally gained. Throw in some SEO and backlink building work yourself and you’ll be bound for success. Just check the competition on the keywords you are targeting though to make sure you’re not competiting against an already super premium established site.
If that SEObook is right about Google’s new preference for brand names in search engine rankings and if Google keeps it that way, that is very bad news for generic domains.
It is a great post by aaron, and honestly makes a lot of sense. Personally i think that the auto insurance companies probably should rank ahead of some of the others – even though their site may not be SEO’d as perfectly as the others.
At the end of the day, you need to build up defensible traffic to your site, and the longer your site is around and the better the content is -(as Elliot says) the more likely it is that you will become the brand that google favors
http://www.scoreboard-media.com/defensible-traffic/
Google rolled out a few big updates in January and February to their ranking algos.
They will change once again shortly.
And no those brands shouldn’t rank #1.
Google wants to push those sites down because if they are at the top 5 or 10 they won’t spend as much on PPC.
The big companies will be like “oh hey, we are getting all this free traffic… no need to advertise”
Quality sites with more content should rank ahead of all the big brand BS.
Google makes a lot of mistakes, this is just one of them… They get it a lot of times but they sure do screw up as well.
Look for changes… It’s coming 😉
Best,
Mike
I don’t think this is a threat for good quality generic and brandable domains which have been well developed. In fact it’s probably a huge boost for decent quality generic domains where the brand is developed around the domain name. The domain will reinforce the brand and vice-versa.
However, I think Rob is right insofar that for ugly keyword-packed generic domains this might be bad news.