Sure it sucks for SEOs, who have been able to game the system (and will undoubtedly find new ways to game the newly revised system), but are you really surprised? Google is going to continue to try to improve results for their users while SEOs continue to try to get traffic/revenue to their less…shall we say…branded site. In my opinion…chalk one up for 99.99% of people online, those who have no idea about anchor text, keyword use in various page elements, link popularity, age of domain, or any of that crap…those who just want to go to a site and get what they’re looking for. Ideally they’d go to a site from a reputable company, one where they might actually be able to contact someone in a call center or in a store if they have a problem, and, yes, one owned by a company that has invested in a lot more than SEO to serve their market/customers.

Instead, I do think the algo may have shifted a bit more towards trust, volume of links, type of links (discounting ones easier for to get for SEO and rewarding ones harder to get unless you have a brand), etc. Big brands naturally get the type of quantity and quality links that are very difficult for non-brand-name sites (i.e. content producers, etc.) to match.

I see some of this in the SERPs lately, but I’m not sold that there was a major and definitive algorithm change specifically to address brands on January 18th. Instead I think it was a link-related algo change that simply happens to benefit brands b/c of the types of links they tend to attract without even trying.

Check out Matt Cutts’ response here:
http://sphinn.com/story/103245#c63705

Once again he has failed to make a convincing case.

There are four reasons why search results change:
1) You do something with your site
2) Someone else does something with their site
3) The search engines do something with their data
4) People change their queries

None of these “Google is favoring brands!” posts has dealt with the fact that a lot of link building is going on.

None of these “Google is favoring brands!” posts has dealt with the fact that Google is devaluing a lot of links.

None of these “Google is favoring brands!” posts has dealt with the fact that these are competitive queries and the times, they are hard for brand owners, too.

More money is being thrown into the organic SEO arena right now — even at the expense of PPC in some cases.

Chicken Little SEO analysis doesn’t provide us with any reason to assume some major brand is going to start knocking optimized sites out of top rankings.

There is lot going on behind the scenes right now OUTSIDE the search engines.

It would actually make eminent sense: small and non-brands would be pushed into even more spending on AdWords to be seen at all in the SERps. Likewise, the big spender brands (who are, let’s not forget, big dogs not least because they’ve spent tons of resources on promotion and advertising in the first place) will be happy, seeing less of a “brand fragmentation”. They’ll also arguably spend more on AdWords if only to make for more “SERP Saturation”.

But what about query space not dominated by commercial brands? That’s an easy one, too: results could always be tweaked in accord with available ad inventory.

Obviously, that way organic search results would be demoted further to a mere background canvas for monetizable PPC – which again would only make sense commercially, no matter that it would essentially constitute a blatant corruption of organic results. (So what’s new?)

Is this actually happening? It’s probably to early to tell. One way to find out might be extensively monitoring their AdWords display in relation to “organic” results.

It’s relatively easy to make a case for brand preference improving a user experience, and probably easy to achieve it thru a combination of tweaks of other, already supported factors.

A more interesting question would be how Google’s management views the suggestion that Google is favoring brands as Aaron suggests. I doubt a response is forthcoming. Even better would be some evidence of Google actually making claims (perhaps to advertisers) that this was an improvement made by Google to help users navigate the cesspool by finding brands more easily. That seems more likely, given the CEO’s promises.

It’s even possible that big brands are finally starting to realize that SEO is important and are devoting more resources to it.

I’m not even sure there’s been a change. I imagine there’s just as many examples of brands that aren’t ranking for expected queries and queries that have all non-brands ranking.

I have heard lots of site owners talk about a change they noticed in mid-January, but it’s mixed experience. Lots of (non-brand) sites have had rankings improved. And many (see,ms to mostly be low-unique content sites, such as review sites that don’t yet have a lot of reviews) have had ranking declines.

In any case, this is one of the primary reasons why I tend to sound like a broken record about fundamentals and not algorithm chasing. The exact weightings and signals will always change so optimizing for any particular thing will never be the best bet long term.

But the real reason I wanted to comment (I know! I haven’t even gotten to the point yet! sheesh.) is that I find it highly unlikely that Google’s organic search is influenced in any way what happens on the ad side. Unless there’s been some radical change where Google has turned into an entirely different company since I worked there, that just doesn’t happen.

AdWords revenue could dwindle to zero and it wouldn’t change how the organic side of things work. It just doesn’t make sense long term. If search results are influenced by anything other than the very best experience for users, then relevance and quality declines and searchers have a poor experience. That would cause Google to lose market share and hurt their attractiveness for advertisers. Advertisers want to advertise where the traffic is, not where they’re getting preferential treatment in the non-ad system.

So, yes. Google’s #1 business goal is making money via AdWords. Which is why they wouldn’t risk losing search traffic by letting their organic results be influenced by anything other than what they think is most relevant and useful for searchers.

I think Aaron Wall has a genius mind & I think this is an attempt to appease brands. Which I think is silly! I mean has anyone stopped to think that maybe bigger brands just don’t value SEO and internet marketing as much as the smaller guys? It has been my experience that smaller companies remain more flexible to SEO and Social Media. Sure, GM or Dell can spend gobs of more money on SEO, but until they make it a integrated process of their existence then the small companies and affiliate marketers that live and breath SEO/IM will rank hirer.

Also, I think Google is constantly in a balancing act, in some ways they have to appease brands to continue to sell them ads, in the other way they have to appease users that support their products.