A recent post on Web Pro News highlights the little extra oomph that Google gives to ‘brands’ when it comes to search results. It would be foolish to think that search engines wouldn’t recognise brands and the brand owners when it comes to a search. The post refers back to a lengthy post on SEO Book.

Both posts argue that Google is giving some form of preferential treatment to brand owners. SEO Book goes even further quoting Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. His point is valid and with a little though you can see where Google is coming from.

The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives,………”Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

There is a lot of false information around and a lot of it ranks extremely well. However, this false information is not going to provide the user with the information they are looking for. The solution, if the search term involves a brand then start with the brand owner’s pages and work back from there. Is it fair to everyone else that has useful information? Perhaps not. However, if there is a balance between the preferential treatment given to a brand and all the other relevant pages then I don’t see a problem. The question is how do they get that balance right. Do they give preferential treatment to just one page and let the natural SERP results deal with the rest? It is probably the fairest result. Will Google act that way? We have no way of knowing. We do know that branding is going to give you a lift.

So, if a user is searching for information on a popular brand, one of the first results should be one of the brand owner pages. With that in mind, developing your own brand should take on more importance. Branding is not an easy task and can take a long time to develop – however this could be future of SEO.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 4:06 am and is filed under Branding and Marketing. 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.