Reputation – The Flip-Side

In my last but one blog post I talked about online reputation, about what people find when they run a search of your business name and how you appear in the search engines. There is however a flip side to the reputation coin, and that is your reputation with Google itself, what they themselves think of you rather than what various online posters think. There is a misconception I’ve heard repeated in the seo trade that there is only one off-page factor, namely backlinks. But this is far from the truth. Google has a much more holistic view of businesses than some people imagine, and they evaluate other things besides just backlinks. In fact, listening to Matt Cutts speaking in 2009, it is quite obvious that Google have been running other metrics besides Page Rank, (the aggregation of incoming backlinks), for quite some time.

Now although Matt Cutts doesn’t elaborate on what these metrics are, he plainly spells out that Page Rank is just one of several factors, “trust, authority, (page rank), reputation, high quality”, considered by Google. Increasingly I am starting to hear seo practitioners these days talking about Trust Rank in opposition to Page Rank, which is a recognition of the fact that Page Rank is not the be all and end all it once was….(there are still seo practioners around – presumably they were cryogenically frozen in 2008 – who tell us backlinks are 80% of the ranking factors). So, the next question must be, if Trust Rank exists, what is it or what might it be? Well, it is comprised of a mixture of on and off page factors, but predominantly off page. Reviews, mentions, (in good and bad places), indexation, industry awards, transparency, business protocols…..there are lots of ways in which Google can put it’s ear to the ground. Since they are an independent news outlet in their own right, it is not as if they should be starved of up-to-date topical information, (Google as a matter of fact had a data sharing arrangement with twitter until mid 2011). If you want a simple distinction between Page Rank and Trust Rank, here is one: If a thousand people backlink to a Company, using generic anchor text, (like say, “professional accountancy firm”), that is a clear example of how backlinks are building Page Rank. Now, conversely, if a thousand people start talking about your Company by name, but without actually using backlinks, (e.g. “Thomas, Scruton and Wellbeck helped me sort out my vat returns”), there is no Page Rank being built because there is no backlinking involved. However…….Google is listening, and all these mentions of your Company, (Brand), are building up your Trust Rank.

It’s All About The Brands These Days

Ok, so Matt Cutts says that Google doesn’t think in terms of brands as such, (primarily because he wants to disassociate Google from being seen as the friend of big brands), but it is quite clear that when we talk about trust, authority, reputation, and high quality, what we are really talking about is brand values. So for me personally, what some seo’s call Trust Rank I prefer to call “Brand Rank”. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, publicly stated in 2008 that:

“The internet is fast becoming a cesspool where false information thrives…. brands are increasingly important signals that content can be trusted. Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired, it is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

Secondly, since the Vince update, Google has been seen to be valuing big brands more; and finally, Google have now created Brand/Business Pages on Google+ .

Brand minus Page Rank equals SERP Rank?

I saw the power of branding recently illustrated in my own niche. I cannot make a case study because the site has now climbed to Page Rank 2, but for a while the site was PR 0. Not only was it PR 0, it was a very new site, (under 1 year old), and it had a very ordinary set of backlinks. The site however was ranking very high for some difficult keywords; notably it was ranking 18 for “seo services”, (Google UK), which is a highly competitive seo keyword. I don’t want to overstate the case for this site, because it did have some backlinks, but in my opinion it was punching well above its weight. So I investigated it and found out that this particular seo Company was the offshoot of pre-existent Company which had split its business in 2, and chosen to run its seo service under a URL which is a hyphenated version of their brand name.

What then appeared to be happening was that the site was ranking well because of the Company’s well established overall reputation, or “Brand Rank”.  (I guess for the purists I should run an experiment by trying to rank a site with zero backlinks to validate my suppositions).

There is nothing particularly ground-breaking in this supposition, and I suspect many people in the seo industry would concur with me, but it does illustrate signally the way seo has changed in the last two years. Even now, I don’t know of any professional seo tool that could have told me that this Company has a strong “Brand Rank”, and that this is the causal factor behind their very high ranking.

Brand is becoming more and more important with Google……

When you boil it all down, branding is really an extra layer in Google’s taxonomy. Branding acts as a buffer for Google between itself and the undifferentiated elements of the web. Typically, when Google sees you as a trusted brand, it will list your website with sitelists. When this happens, it means you’ve entered the club….you’ve graduated. You’ve passed your Google internship; in short, they trust your brand.

When you rank well in Google, you are not just getting the largest piece of the pie, the first port of call for those searching, you are also gaining exposure as a trusted brand. People use Google because they trust Google’s results, and when you rank high in Google, there is an implied endorsement of your brand taking place. 5 years ago less so, and 10 years ago, absolutely not; there was of course a time when Google’s results threw up a complete hotch-potch of the cooked, the raw and the inedible. These days quite the converse. Google’s results tend to be pretty consistent. Because Google is consistently improving their metrics, and getting increasingly expert at picking good fits for search queries, the branding value of being at the top increases. We know, whether or not we articulate it to ourselves, that Google’s top rankings are a lot more trustworthy than they once were. As the dross finds it increasingly difficult to sneak into the top rankings, we become increasingly more trusting of Google’s rankings, and hence subconsciously associate top ranking sites with quality. Added to that, all the various tweaks and subtle identifiers that Google is adding reflect their view of your brand. And good branding means trust, and trust means conversions….

What does all this mean for companies employing seo services?

Well in short, it should mean that the days are numbered for fly by night seo Companies who use cheap tricks for rankings. In fact, it has a host of implications for the way seo Companies practice and the way seo is performed.

In Part 2 I will explain some of the ramifications of the way Google is now carrying out their metrics, and implementing brand rank; in the meantime, if you have any SEO questions, or have some interesting SEO insights to share, why not join me at my SEO Q & A’s ….. on my Google+ Brand Page, of course.