There’s been a lot of talk about Google favouring brands in search results. For me this is not new, they’ve always tried to do this. They just got better at aligning search results with public opinion as oppose to SEO’d opinion. General search results have always been about ‘trying‘ to rank the brands for commercial queries. This makes sense as Brands are defined by public perception – we expect to see them.
The issue for Google has been the way it tried to identify those brands. Essentially the Google algorithm relied almost entirely on the published web to define relevance and credibility/reputation. This was easy to manipulate and doesn’t always represent relevance defined by the searcher. My favourite search query for ‘table’ is a good example of this misalignment.
With this new update still to roll out for Google UK, I’m seeing more brands ranking for terms they are not specifically optimised for.
Now for the pseudo science bit -
Searching for ‘flights’ British Airways are now in the top 10 from a previous position outside the top 30.
Searching on a pure anchor text search using ‘allinanchor:flights’ they are still outside the top 30. But on a synonymous search using ‘~flights’ they are in the top 10.
So BA has been identified as
The tilde (~) query returns results based on not just the pages matching the exact query words but those that are synonyms of the query words using something similar to Latent Semantic Analysis. I say something similar because we are seeing something more than just statistical analysis of on-page content. If this was the case, we’d be seeing BMW ranking for ‘car’ (we still may).
Looks to me like user data is being incorporated to identify those instances where the synonym matches searcher expectation.
Note ‘BA flights’ in the related queries section at the bottom of the result page for ‘flights’.
So we may be seeing brands that haven’t bothered to optimise for searches gaining a few positions for core terms. Though this is all a bit hit and miss and is no substitute for proper keyword analysis and content optimisation. At least not yet.
