There has long been speculation about how Google actually measures "brand authority." Many times over the past couple of years have those who speak outside of those fortified Googleplex walls made it clear that brand building is the way to win the organic visibility war.
That statement however has always sounded wooly in the extreme. How is it possible to measure an almost intangible thing at scale and via a complex formula? If you are Google, it seems there is ALWAYS a way.
A fairly innocent-looking patent filed last month, which some say could be the Panda patent may have gone some way to answering that question.
Within this post we dive into that patent and other supporting evidence in an attempt to understand what the opportunity may be for digital marketers in the future. As part of that attempt, we offer our interpretation of various pieces of the patent itself, and also look at actual data to see if mentions are already playing a part in the ranking of sites.
The patent in question, which can be found here and has been expertly covered by Bill Slawski, may cover the Panda Algorithm's key workings, but the piece we are really interested in right now is the information around measuring site authority and relevance using a ratio of links and mentions, or "implied links." It's this specific area that got both the team here at Zazzle Media and also at Moz excited. You can see Cyrus Shepard and Rand Fishkin's reaction right here:
I knew it! RT @CyrusShepard: This Google patent defines non-linking citations as "implied links" https://t.co/cOxv0irklk
— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) March 26, 2014So, what exactly does the patent imply? It is complex, wordy, and difficult to interpret, but it starts by talking about what Google calls "reference queries:"
"A reference query for a particular group of resources is a previously submitted search query that has been categorized as referring to a resource in the particular group of resources."
To most of us, that statement appears as bad English at best, but there are a couple of ways this could be used. It first allows Google to look at what terms people have used previously through search to find and then click on a site, or group of sites. In doing so, it would then also allow them to "map" semantically relevant queries (and thus mentions of a brand) to a site in order to further extend an understanding of the "popularity" or "authority" of that entity.
The patent also covers a mechanism for allowing Google to discount some links and give others greater weighting based on a modification factor:
"The method of claim 1, wherein determining a respective group-specific modification factor for a particular group of resources comprises: determining an initial modification factor for the particular group of resources, wherein the initial modification factor is a ratio of a number of independent links counted for the particular group to the number of reference queries counted for the particular group."
This could be especially important where lots of links from the same company (or "group") point at a site, as the search engine could discount those from the true overall picture. It then also gives engineers the ability to look at "quality" as a measure of the overall relevance to the queried subject matter, which is called out in a separate bit of the patent:
"For example, the initial score can be, e.g., a measure of the relevance of the resource to the search query, a measure of the quality of the resource, or both."
Then, the patent specifically mentions that links can either be "express" or "implied," calling out non-linking mentions in a rather unmistakable way:
"The system determines a count of independent links for the group (step 302). A link for a group of resources is an incoming link to a resource in the group, i.e., a link having a resource in the group as its target. Links for the group can include express links, implied links, or both. [...] An implied link is a reference to a target resource, e.g., a citation to the target resource, which is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource. Thus, a resource in the group can be the target of an implied link without a user being able to navigate to the resource by following the implied link.
What does all this mean? It means that once a connection is made by someone typing in a brand name or other search query and then clicking on a site it creates a connection in Google's eyes. The search engine can then store that info and use it in the context of unlinked mentions around the web in order to help weight rankings of particular sites.
If this is the Panda Patent, as it is part of a wider algorithm, it would also look at the quality of pages on a site and how "commercial" they are in their targeting – this was originally designed to negatively impact content farms that created content targeted aggressively at commercial terms – those that think "search engine-first" as opposed to "audience-first."
The patent publication was closely followed by a related Webmaster video by Matt Cutts within which the head of Google's webspam team talked about a "forthcoming update" that would look differently at how the search engine measures authority:
By arguing that there is a difference between popularity and links, Cutts made clear that his engineers are looking very closely at how to continue to tweak the existing algo to make more popular sites rank higher.
That's a big deal.
Those two pieces of new evidence suggest there is a seismic shift underway in how links are weighted and how relevance is measured – the two building blocks of search.
It's something Rand here at Moz first touched on back in late 2012 and I covered in detail in this post a few weeks later.
In it I gave a little background into why Google is hell bent on getting away from the concept of a link-based economy:
"My view is that Google is really trying to clear up the link graph and with it valueless links so that it can clearly understand relevance and associations again.
It's something that web 'creator' Tim Berners Lee first wrote about back in 2006 in this magazine article and Google has been talking about ever since, ploughing lots of cash into acquisitions to get it there.
So, why invest so much time, effort and resource into such a game-changing project? Quite simply because its existing keyword based info retrieval model is in danger of being bettered by semantic search engines."
Let's look into the how and why in a little more detail.
Links
Everybody who reads this article will be more than aware of the importance of links in building authority.
A lot has changed in this space over recent years, however, as Google has developed systems to measure where the link is coming from and assign more (or less) value to it as a result.
The next logical step in that process could be the downgrading of the follow link within the overall picture of ranking factors. It is something that has been expected for some time and was reiterated by Moz's own panel of experts in the annual Ranking Factor survey.
We know that follow links have been gamed "to death" in the past, so it would make sense to make that particular element a little less important in the overall mix. Nofollows can still tell Google a lot about a site, as can how much people are talking about it.
Nofollow
By definition a nofollow link does not pass equity, or PageRank, to a site. We know that for certain. What is less clear is what, if anything, it does pass.
Google certainly knows these links are there, and this latest patent could suggest they are taking a little more notice of them than they are letting on.
The patent highlights the importance of "reference queries" and "implied links," and also that Google looks to discount links from the same "group" or brand and instead wants to concentrate on independent links from unassociated domains.
Critically, PageRank is not mentioned, which suggests that other factors are being measured in terms of how much equity is being passed by each independent link, or mention.
Mentions
It is the "implied link" element that makes most interesting reading, as it is black-and-white evidence that Google is looking at mentions as a measure of authority.
It is logical, after all, that a popular brand would have more people talking about it online than one that is simply good at manipulating the algorithm and has invested heavily in link building to that end.
The results from our sample research also support this, with larger, better-known brands generally attracting greater numbers of mentions than others.
Testing
Of course, the question remains, is this already in use? To test this properly would require a monumental amount of measurement across a plethora of verticals over an extended period of time, and sadly, I did not have the time or resources to run that project for the sake of this post, but it is still worth sharing some of the data and an overview of what may be going on.
The caveat here is absolutely that this does NOT constitute any kind of fact-finding mission, simply an informed commentary on a few anomalies that cannot be explained simply by looking at follow links alone.
To discover if there are any initial signs that this kind of system may already be in effect, I spent some time analyzing three separate, random SERPs here in the UK.
They were:
- "Car Insurance"
- "Mortgage Calculator"
- "Mens Clothing"
All three are competitive terms and are "owned" in the main by what we might know as brands in the wider world.
Below you can see a simple chart for each of these, showing:
- Follow links
- Nofollow links
- Follow/nofollow ratio
- The number of brand mentions in the last four weeks
- Ratio between links and mentions
Clearly this isn't a scientific study, but it does serve as a "finger in the air" analysis from which a few interesting observations can be made.
The first two tables contain data examining the whole domain's link profile, while the third looks specifically at links to the URL indexed for the particular term we are analyzing.
The raw data is below and here is an explanation of where that data was drawn from:
- Position – Records what position we saw the domain in for the given search term in google.co.uk.
- Follow link – for the first two ('Car Insurance' and 'Mens Clothing') this is the number of follow links across the whole domain. For 'mortgage calculator' it records just the follow links into the specific URL indexing for that term. The data is from AHREFS.
- As above but for no follow links.
- The number of referring domains into the domain ('Car Insurance' and 'Mens Clothing') and the URL ('Mortgage Calculator').
- Mentions – How many mentions of the brand there have been in the last four weeks (as taken from Moz Fresh Web Explorer and using exact match brand term only).
- Ratio of follow to no follow links – Designed to see if there is a correlation with this and position.
- Ratio of links to mentions – A look at the relationship between how many links a site has and how many mentions in the previous four weeks.
Let's now look at each table in a little more detail but with the understanding that there are a myriad of other factors that affect the result. After each piece of analysis I have added general comments:
"Car insurance"
- Despite having considerably fewer links overall across the domain, Go Compare is first. Does this suggest they have hit a sweet spot in terms of links versus mentions and brand metrics?
- Money Supermarket proves that more links doesn't win. The site has many, many more than anyone else in the top five and yet is not first. Link volume clearly matters, but it is absolutely not the only factor at play.
- Do Compare the Market and Confused "win" and feature in the top five on the strength of their mention data? A higher ratio than the top three but MUCH lower link numbers suggests that might be the case.
- LV.com is the anomaly as its mention to link ratio is low. This suggests that sheer numbers of links are potentially helping it rank well as well as on-page factors that make the brand super-relevant for car insurance.
"Mens clothing"
- ASOS and House of Fraser walk away with it here, and interestingly both of these sites have very similar ratios for both follow and no-follow links AND for links and mentions.
- Next is an anomaly but only because measuring true mentions is very hard due to the brand having a "generic" word as its "brand." Could this cause issues for Google going forward in measuring similar brands?
- Again, Burton (in particular) and Topman to a degree show that you can earn your place with high link-to-mention ratios.
- Topman should rank higher. Is it because of link quality? Certainly the ratio of follow to nofollow is lower than those above them.
"Mortgage calculator"
- This batch looks just at the URL ranking for the term, not the whole domain, to allow us to see both sides of the story.
- The BBC clearly runs away with it in every sense and by these figures would be almost impossible to usurp.
- The data is less correlated here; suggesting that domain-wide factors are definitely at play in factoring which URL should rank where.
- NatWest is a really interesting result as it has very few links relative to those around it. The ratio of no-follow-to-follow is very high, and the brand gets a lot of mentions. The site is also very relevant for "mortgages" as a percentage of overall content.
As a further piece of analysis we have also included a "random" site from page two to support the concept that a combination/ratio of links to mentions affects rankings.
That site is woolwich.co.uk, a small UK building society (bank). Its own mortgage calculator page was ranking 16th when we ran the analysis, and interestingly, we can see that its ratio of follow-to-nofollow is low, as is the number of mentions of the brand in the past four weeks. On pure followed link numbers the site should rank top five, but instead it languishes on page two.
Is there a perfect ratio?
It's clear that the small sample above is no true reflection of how the ratio of links to mentions affects rankings, but it has certainly raised some interesting points for further discussion and testing.
What certainly can be said is that the measurement of brand mentions is certainly possible, and Google certainly now has the patent to cover it off as a potential ranking factor.
Mentions alone do not tell the whole story, of course, and links are still very important in the overall mix of factors that affect rankings, but it is now time to start thinking about how you can create brand buzz and grow those mentions.
The possible good news for the smaller guys, though, is that it does seem that Panda is beginning to look at how much of a site is relevant to any one specific term and giving over extra "authority" to that site in that niche.
A great example are the building societies in the UK that rely on mortgages to make up the majority of their business. As a result they do seem to rank better for mortgage-related terms.
This could really help specialist businesses compete again with the "big guys."
What can you do?
The key point here is how you can utilize this data to improve your own strategy, and while there is no conclusive proof that mentions and nofollow links matter, the evidence is starting to pile up.
Given what Mr. Cutts said in the video we mention earlier in the post, the patent for Panda and increasing amounts of data highlighting similar findings, the argument is certainly there.
My advice would be to begin thinking outside of follow links. Be happy to earn (and build) nofollowed links and mentions. Think outside the link, because there IS value in driving mentions and building brand.
How do you do that? The simple answer is to get creative with your communications strategy and build content that will make people talk about you and share. At the heart of that is a great ideation process, and I have previously shared Zazzle Media's own way of creating great ideas consistently here.
Think particularly around creating content that plays on core emotions and also give things away. In a detailed report first shared in 2010, titled " Social Transmission, Emotion, and the Virality of Online Content," the authors discovered there is a strong relationship between emotion and how likely it is your content will "go viral."
Amongst the many eye-opening discoveries the publication discusses:
- Negative content tends to be less viral than positive content
- Awe-inspiring content and content that surprises or is humorous is more likely to be shared
- Content that causes sadness can become viral but is generally less likely to
- Content that evokes anger is more likely to be shared
And finally, make sure you start tracking and reporting mentions and nofollowed links. Knowing how you are performing can help you iterate your PR and content strategies to achieve greater traction.
In short, compelling content, created over the long term WILL now win, as it is being rewarded.
Very good recap Simon of something that the most attentive among us were "knowing" before the Panda Patent was finally publicly available.
An un-bearded Rand, Bill and I few months later were talking about co-occurrences (which are what you call "mentions") since a long time.
Us three plus Matthew Brown had an interesting conversation about this same topic few weeks ago on Twitter (here the link to that conversation), the TL;DR of which could be saying that most of this power of mentions is a consequence of a wider Entity Recognition work Google does.
Just a caveat: "brand mentions" isn't an incorrect definition, but - in order to avoid any possible "Google favors Brands" empty of real meaning reaction - it would be better to call those mentions "Entity mentions".
In fact, what you are saying focusing in the specifics of Brands, is equally valid for Persons, Cities, Stars and Planets, "Things"... aka: Named Entities.
Thanks Gianluca. And I agree, we had all suspected that this had been the case but it is good to look at it in 'black and white' and also to start studying how that 'ratio' may work in practice. I too wrote a post on here in Jan 2013 on the subject -
https://moz.com/blog/semantic-web-and-link-building-without-links-the-future-for-seo - but this paper now proves that it is not just supposition and should be invested in and measured. And it's important that the industry works to educate the wider business world on the benefits working on the wider 'brand' piece can bring.
(added the active link to the post cited by Simon :))
So the patent doesn't discuss any ratio of links to mentions, and doesn't seem to care about that at all. I'm not sure why it should, either.
Mentions are not the new links in that how "independent links" are calculated and used within this patent have nothing to do with the citation model that PageRank is based upon.
The Patent doesn't use the word "brand" at all and the kind of association that one might call an entity association is likely more appropriate - is limiting this patent to "brands," a self-constraint that we are imposing upon ourselves to our own significant detriment, possibly solely to fulfill a sad conformational bias?
Yes, Eric Schmidt may have said in the past that Google prefers brands. Chances of Eric Schmidt writing any of Google's ranking algorithms - 0%
Yes, there are a number of SEOs who have written about Google's "brand Preference" - This seems to correspond to the number of disgruntled SEOs who had their affiliate websites burned by Google - at least enough to promulgate folklore about Google favoring brands over the sites that sell those brands products without being those brands.
Number of search engineers working on search quality at Google who have written a ranking signal which focuses primarily upon "brand authority" Unlikely any at all. Being able to understand entities and authority and authenticity, maybe. But a pure "x=brand, therefore rank = ++++" is more than a little too simplistic.
Gianluca and Simon question for you,
how do will affect generic brand names and URLs (sample industry.com)? the word is highly used one. isn't there something more that has to be on site, like one link on the domain authority that at least points to certain reference that is that brand that is being mentioned.
I have noticed a certain increase on site serps (but is also part of the general growth), since my site has the generic branding trying to understand the point in depth.
Interesting - I read Bill's article too and it certainly get's you thinking...
If brand citations are likely to become an increasingly important part of Google's algorithm, then deciding on your brand name is going to become increasingly critical. Choosing to name your website/business something like "{service name}{location} just to try and exploit exact/partial match domains could be one tactic that may backfire.
If someone mentions you on the web, then you want to make sure that it's absolutely obvious that it's *you* that they're mentioning and not someone else using an equally generic "brand".
Building brand awareness could become the next "link building" and those organisations with the largest budgets will be able to afford blanket/multi-channel advertising to make sure that their brand is in front of everyone's mind. All of a sudden press releases start to look more attractive again (even with the no-followed links.)
Where that leaves the small business trying to compete with large market leaders I don't know.
Could brand related searches (with some caveats) become another way for Google to measure the "popularity" of brands?
Hey Doug. Thanks for the comment. You are right also - 'claiming' your brand is going to be key here, which is where working on knowledge graph and 'entity' work (as several recent posts have discussed) is important to do right now.
Reading more into the patent and other recent comments by Matt Cutts it does seem that 'smaller' businesses can 'win' by focusing more on being a master of the one thing that is most important to them, as opposed to being a bigger business trying to do it all. The mortgage calculator example above proves this I think as there are some domains in there winning because a greater percentage of their site is about 'mortgages'...
Hi Simon ... Will banner advertisement on portals and other high traffic websites count towards building brand identity?
difficult to say for sure but my guess would be no. However, there is certainly an argument to suggest it could add some value as part of the ratio.
Ok. Thanks for your feedback
Great point, Doug.
So no follows are the new follows :) I've recognized their power for citation for a while now as have loosely defined "blackhats". Curious to see how this develops in the coming months...
Simon,
I really feel co-occurences are the future, but they're not likely to replace the power of links as a whole. Maybe, a natural-looking ratio between co-occurences and links might be used by Google to validate a high amount of link authority.
Interesting post Simon.
It'll be much more interesting and will be a really big boost for startups if Google gives more importance to ratios instead of just looking at how big the numbers are.
Interesting article Simon! All the dots are connecting correctly:
1. Create an attractive website with good navigation.
2. Concentrate on developing content for the website.
3. Let people link to your website as well as make mentions of it on social networks.
4. Continue on with points 2 and 3 on a regular basis and build your brand identity online so that people recognize/remember it for the service/product you are offering.
The most important thing to remember is that points 2, 3 and 4 will not create results overnight and you need to be patient and continue your good work.
This blog is a great explanation over creating a branding of your website. I enjoyed reading the facts and figures about nofollow-dofollow and ratio link-mentions ratios. Also the video of Matt Cutts was a real eye opener.
A great piece of advice on future proof SEO. Thanks a lot for your efforts in putting down this post. Post Panda, I was a strong believer of focusing on "brand building" rather than "link building", this post made my focus stronger. :)
as the best way to have your brand mentioned over and over again is to write content that spread the word about your brand with hope that people will spread the word through social media
Wow, what a great article. Thanks for sharing the test results and stats and also for the finial statement that negative, sad or anger creating content is less likely to share. Our content is a lot about security and it is hard to come up with positive content, so this will be a big challenge for us :)
Great article and very interesting. What stuck out to me was the Natwest company when you searched for "Mortgage Calculators". Their ratio of Follow to Nofollow is significantly large, and they have the least amount of referring domains and mentions. The mysteries of a Google.
I do like the way Google is trying to return higher quality websites for search queries, and I respect their efforts to weed out those who try to game and cheat the system.
I also do agree that brand awareness works for larger companies. But, smaller companies or start ups will have to put more effort to increase awareness about their brands. It is actually getting more difficult for start ups if brand awareness is also factor for ranking websites. Content marketing also ask for larger budgets to have better results. What will be the strategy for smaller start ups? One of the very small start up company was doing lot of campaigning activities like banner advertisements, deals & offers promotions, sponsored ads but was not working on SEO. During three months of campaigning, they started ranking on top 3 pages of Google. This was surprising result but confirmed that branding works
It's not easy anymore, but nothing worth having is, as they say! The key for smaller businesses is to really work hard at being the best at a specific thing. Imagine yourself as a publisher in your space. Add value. Help people. Work creatively on ideas that will create 'buzz'. It doesn't have to be resource intensive. They key is in the ideas.
Great to hear that you have seen that approach working first hand too!
Good point Isha. This leads us to think closely on maintaining the ratio of branding to SEO. Each organization needs to follow their own custom strategy to see what works best for them.
As we see in the results above (from the tests) there is no specific ratios or facts that we can pic to define what will help us rank well, it becomes very important to experiment with new things and measures to tell Google that we are worth ranking. But yes, everything boils down to 'content'. And that is the biggest fight.
Great analysis Simon.
Cheers!
Thanks for the post Simon
2 big questions come from this;
1) How would Google differentiate between 2 companies with the same name, especially with web companies setting up left, right and centre, would this use something like information from companies house?
2) Google is consistently saying that they want to help the SME section but this would not be the case as SME cant afford the PR methods employed by the big bluechip companies.
Interesting nonetheless!
Hi Kieran. I've just answered this over on Facebook but in short it's going to be the big challenge for Google I think on this. Their data gathering abilities are better than any of us realise so they'll be looking at lots of data points on this. Everything from authorship links and context to the knowledge graph and back again. The key thing for us is to ensure we are claiming those 'entities' early in the knowledge graph - a little like you would other intellectual property. I'm sure they'll be a legal firm specializing in this in no time:) (note to self: good business idea!)
I was thinking about this too Kieran, if starting a new company (let's say a plumbing company). Would it be wise to become a franchisee of an existing big name or build your own brand?
I have a few clients who are franchisees, the "entity mentions" would lead me to believe my clients will be given an advantage over their competitors due to that massive amounts of entity mentions across the web. Or..not depending on how Google prefers to read that data :)
Unless he was given permission, the author of this forbes post stole most of this post without any attribution:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/0...
There's a flaw with the interpretation of the patent in both this article and in the Forbes article. :( but I hate seeing people steal stuff like this.
Very interesting and positive news I think. However you have to keep in mind that gaming mentions would be even easier than links, so there would have to be some sort of strict quality threshold before Google even started to consider in this data as a ranking factor.
For example you could go to a super high authority site and mention your brand name within a comment, or post it within a Q&A expert section etc. etc. so again this comes down to editorially placed in-context mentions that actually hold value as a "vote".
If they did start to hold greater value our site would gain a lot I think! As we've recently had unlinked mentions of our company and web address on Yahoo news, BT.com, Admiral.com, Newspapers and other large authority sites.
You're right about co-occurences spam: it can be relatively easy, even if not so easy as it may seem at a first sight.
For this reason, in a conference last year, Matt Cutts said that surely co-occurrences matter, but that they look at them with attention and surely not consider them as the "new big ranking factor", but just one of the many.
Said that, I think that the most important thing we should understand as SEOs is that "branding" is something we should care about a lot more than we were used to (just check - for instance - to how differently are welcome branding and "SEO tactics" posts also here on Moz), and that Branding possibly is the quintessential expression of OnOff Marketing, as every Internet Marketing disciplines (SEO, Social, Content, Email Marketing...) and classic Offline ones work together when we do branding.
Panda is designed to understand 'quality' and 'authority' across a multitude of measures and metrics, so gaming it in this way will not work, thankfully. Working on brand is the key here, as Gianluca points out. Building spammy mentions is certainly not aligned to that!
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Link building on brand name will effect more than keywords. Is that so?
If content of the page is so relevant and in quality, if people come more often by searching on Google, that page has more chances to come on SERP.
Is that something???
Google local has been doing this all along, more or less, haven't they? Isn't a citation essentially a mention?
Thank you for this post. It just shows again that in order to rank well in the search engines we need to focus more and more on building smart online marketing and communications strategies ...
Cheers,
Lex
I agree, brand names matters more than we imagine, Google will not ignore such signals in order to improve their ranking algorithm. I just wonder whether we can read the patent details now. I have searched from Google scholar, there are some articles on "implied links", can you give us Google's patent on this, Simon?
The link count and brand mention as Google's measure of brand authority in the said patent is a way of reiterating the idea of writing quality content, as the best way to have your brand mentioned over and over again is to write content that spread the word about your brand with hope that people will spread the word through social media
Great post as always, of course. I just want to add regarding No Follow links.
Some time ago I made a post somewhere (maybe even here on Moz) that I am pretty sure No Follow links are much more useful then we actually think. It seems to be true. If we look on a thing logically, we can assume maybe they still rank Do Follow more than No Follow, but what if some website has only Do Follow? That cannot be possible in fact unless you are performing a SEO on that website. That's why many new website fails so quick.
At the end, we could get some conclusion that No Follow links could be a very effective tool for Google to discover whether or not some website has unnatural traffic / links and all other call it "spam techniqes" used.
very informative post, great work simon.
Thank you. May i know what is process for linkbuilding way with new seo rules?
Wasn't really much satisfied with the post. Sorry! But If there was one link building strategy I wish would fall off the face of the earth, It would be Guest blogging.
Then, the average link builder wouldn’t have a clue how to do “white hat” SEO.
But also, I do think not enough people take advantage of fail-proof content for link building.
But now guest blogging going to spam links. Is it true?
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Excellent written post. thanks for sharing with us.
How is Google going to conquer the "implied links" or mentions factor - it appears to me that any brand with a generic name or similar name to competitors will create huge problems. Does this mean that I can ride on the coat tails of other brands by including one of their words in my new company name? This just seems very hard to determine and distinguish brands based on mentions. Your "Next" example above got me thinking.
Great post, Simon!
This is exactly why I have always argued (such as here on Moz) that PR is essential to online marketing. The best linkbuilding is not something that you do -- it is the result of good PR and marketing. The more "brand mentions" or "co-occurrences" that occur in quality, authoritative online publications that are relevant to your industry, the better. It's building a brand for the long term -- it's not really about building links.
And I was suprised why serps going up when no new links have been made (and no new content). I did small seo job but it was just writing articles without any links but with brand/kws inside. Now I know it wasn't a mistake from google:) Is that the future? No links at all?:)
Probably not but the mix is certainly becoming more complex in a bid to better define 'quality'. Thanks for sharing your experience also. Interesting to hear it works!
All the more reason to put greater emphasis into PR then.
Also "Citation Occurrence" & "Entity mentions" sounds like keyword density part 2 lol
Agree. The key here is how they are linked to authority also. Lots of spammy mentions will get you nowhere now. Google has the engine to understand 'quality', which is what Panda is all about as a whole.
Great post Simon! What are your thoughts on spammy mentions actually hurting your site? Do you think it will be possible? It wouldn't really make sense, but hey sometimes Google's actions don't really make sense :)
This is further evidence of the convergence of social and search as well as that Google is getting much better at really understanding content and intent.
It seems that many people are focusing on brand and how this may hurt the little guys. But if you really listen to what Matt says in the video, it is broader than that. By understanding the context of how and where a site or brand is linked and now mentioned, Google can then better understand that it may be an authority for a particular area, which in turn creates more useful and relevant search results.
As with any business aspect, if you are the startup or small guy on the block you need to understand what it is that makes you stand out and use your niche to get found. For example a small local staffing agency is not going to go head to head with monster, careerbuilder or even a company like Manpower. Hoping to get found when people search for something like "jobs", is going to be an up hill battle. To be successful they need to use the niche that best serves their market and work on building awareness around this.
I would like to first thanks Simons and Moz community for such a wonderful post. I am totally agree with you Simons and try to suggest my co-workers and friends to work more on brand awareness unless your keywords. A reputed brand has well responded value in industry and it differs you from others.
Great post!
I'm curious about how they'd discern between brand mentions and non-brand mentions for brands who have 'common' words in their name. For example, Black Coffee, Fast Company, etc.
Awesome post, but I have to ask the questions no one else seems to be asking...why would Google apply for a patent for Panda three years after its release, and after it created another algorithm to replace it (Hummingbird)?
And, are all these speculations moot anyway, since it's possible these terms don't apply in Hummingbird?
Great article Simon, thanks for doing all that leg work!
So often I find myself trying to convey this same message to new clients but its so hard to alter the way they look at SEO. After years of their previous SEOs drilling into them that "lots of links means good SEO", daring to step outside of this 2011 mindset can see some odd looks.
Its great to see Google are still so eager to make such major algo changes. For those of us doing it properly, this can bring nothing but positive results.
Absolutely fantastic post. Thank you, Simon!
So this means PR is now more valuable than ever; online and social PR, in particular.
Since we are all aware that everything gets "gamed" at some point, what do you think might be the future abuses of all of this? Granted, this isn't new and you can see that others in the comments are already seeing some aspects of this shift currently. I'm just wondering, are we now going to get a larger flurry of crappy content with zero links and loads of brand mentions (not that we don't already)?
I read very old post about Brand Awareness and ratio and also about row urls, urls etc. Day by Day, traditional techniques like creating links with anchor text etc are ending and importance of brand, authority, mention are increasing.
People should scale these and boom on search engines.
So EMD's can win a lot in this context, ¿isn't it?
Good Post!!
I thank www.moz.com for these interesting content "The Panda Patent: Brand Mentions Are the Future of Link Building" after reading commects I have some doubts in my mind.. I have a website named www.broadbandchandigarh.info Based on internet broadband services in chandigarh. Actually we are authorized dealers of various internet broadband companies at chandigarh city,India. This website is combination of all major companies like airtel, connect, tata Photon etc but this is a small website for local people.. then what is need of Brand Mention in these type of small business websites