Google brands displace the little guy
Friday, May 7th, 2010By now you know that Google has added brand names to the top of the SERPs on searches for products such as “digital cameras.”
This makes major brands easier to be found in the SERPs (since they are at the top), and it could be useful for people searching for a big brand product to purchase.
But I worry about what this will do to the little guy.
Personalized search already made it so that highly-ranked sites would be able to continue to rank highly if you follow the logic that people click on the high rankings and by doing so that would make the result more popular and would thus keep it higher in said personalized rankings.
Now the little guy must also fight against big brands that really don’t need much help to begin with. They are getting artificially high placements in the SERPs just for being a brand name rather than having a site that the Google algorithm ranks highly in the SERPs like it’s supposed to be.
Furthermore, is it fair that in the below screen capture for the keyword search “Halloween costumes,” there are “shopping results” that feature links and photos for Amazon.com, Buy.com and ToysRUs.com as the de facto third result above the fold for this keyword phrase? Why should those big brands get special treatment over smaller sites ranking naturally for this keyword?
In this example, it’s also getting more difficult for the average web surfer to determine what’s an advertisement and what’s a natural search result, unless they’re a savvy Internet marketer of course.
I do see how preferential treatment for brands signifies progress as well as opportunities for SEOs. Between the aforementioned results, social search and news results, there are more ways to rank highly in the SERPs aside from old-fashioned link building. If you understand how to rank in these new ways, you will possess an advantage over your competition.
If you are a distributor of a particular brand, this will afford you more of an incentive to optimize for that brand name because this will clearly increase the searches for that brand thanks to it being at the top of the SERPs. For brands, this will place a higher emphasis on optimizing for particular keywords for which they can possibly rank under this new brand category.
But the Internet used to be a bastion of meritocracy, and I wonder if placing brands on top of the SERPs now lends too much authority to brand equity at the expense of natural rankings.
What do you think of Google brands? Let us know in the comments!
Here at Vertical Measures we get a number of clients who wish for us to pursue Manual Link Building campaign for their website to improve the quality of backlinks to their pages. This involves going out to relevant websites, contacting the webmasters directly and promoting the client’s website to see if they would be interested in linking to the page anywhere on their site. The one thing that is always the same about the work that we do in this area for our clients is that it is always different.
scheduled for the interview this week. His insights on the future of content strategy and marketing are below. 
I’ve always believed this…advertising is a luxury. Content is survival. 
most content marketing fails because the executives don’t believe in the strategy.
Arnie recently forwarded our staff a series of resources and ideas via e-mail like he has done several times in the past. Included in the e-mail was one such article about guest blogging, a post by Glen over at ViperChill 
