How search volume data may be used to determine brand authority

Really thorough and interesting analysis. I have no doubt Google uses search volumes as indicators, particularly for outliers, alongside things like clickthroughs (eg if loads of people search for travel insurance and click on Post Office even though its #8) and bounce rate from SERPS.

Hmmm So maybe you could creating a bot to search a brand name a few hundred times a day from different IPs to see if that lifts their positions? (not gonna, just sayin…) ;)

“I wonder how long before Google starts regionalising the search results based on search volumes?”

Hopefully they don’t, considering how awful and irrelevant Google Local Search is!

I’m at the top of Scotland and Google thinks I’m in Leeds! :D

What would be the impact of “branding” on the domain names? Does this mean that domain names with keywords have a better chance of ranking than for a non-keyword domain name…

Hi your theory fits for a few instance and does relate to the ne Vince update but some people are relating this to the US sites in UK SERPs which is a totally different issue.
It may have rolled out at ta similar time toVince / Brand but it’s not the same issue.

Google UK data is just wrong at the moment. End of story. Why well I have a good theory reinforced by facts. But perhaps later…. I’m waiting for stability before I break this story. :-)

It’s an interesting theory and it’s almost certainly something that Google must have thought about if they aren’t already using it. Having said that, it might be quite a noisy signal and, like Jaamit mentions, it could potentially be abused really easily. In truth, it could be this along with other factors that Google look at.

Clive, sorry but you clearly haven’t been watching the travel insurance serps – they have dropped into number one from nowwhere and have risen for a number of other related phrases.

Patrick – you are spot on with this blog and well done for outing the vince update first – I think you’ve nailed it with this post.

R.

The UK data is still moving a lot – does anyone know if the US data has stopped moving after this rolled out in Feb?

has anyone got any specific examples of .com’s still appearing in Google UK [pages from the uk] only i.e. the Google UK local db?

I’m not after US sites I’m after UK based .com sites. To me it looks like Google accidentally screwed the algorithm with Vince. This sucked in a load of US .com results in to the UK Local results and now they have tried to correct it by pulling back all the .com’s from results and they’ve just ditched all the UK .com’s as well!!!!
Tell me I’m wrong? Tell me that collective IQ of Google staff is 3 figures at least… yes I do mean collective ;-)

I have .com which has just had 2000 pages removed from the index for Google uk local (not google global) . It is still in the Global and ranking well but it’s has GONE from the Google UK local DB!

Some people still get a bit confused by this… and I wonder if this is what Google were trying to fix? Trying to help people who think that just because they search on Google UK that all the results are from the UK local db! Only if you toggle on ‘pages from the UK’ even my Granny knows this!!! :-)

@SEO-Doctor, can you post any kind of evidence of this please. Thank you in advance.

@Mike, my personal homepage is a “UK based” “UK hosted” .com. My site appears in “pages from the UK” for several keywords.

I don’t want to be seen plugging my site here. If you tap in the keywords “merchandising strategy” and pages from the UK, my site appears.

The traffic on my site has dropped to 30% of what it was two months ago. I definitely have no penalty. Perhaps it is the same issue that Mike is speaking of and since my site is to do with educational information the summer holidays may be the cause also.

@All of you, I would be very grateful if anyone could answer my following question definitively:

Q) My site is a dot com site hosted in the UK, and it is a content only site that appeals to the whole world. Should I set the geographic target in Google Webmaster tools to the UK on my site? Will this increase my traffic?

I know Google use your IP address when a geographic target is not set.

Thank you guys in advance.

@rob abdul
hi rob I’d expect all your pages to still exist in the local index as it’s uk hosted.
it’s .com outside uk hosted sites that are affected, I’m trying to find any exmples that aren’t but I haven’t so it looks like they have ALL been dropped from the UK local index in the last few days!

take all your keywords and get a ranking for them in Google UK [the web]=global and [pages from the uk]=local index. Also check the number of pages indexed for your site in both.

set the Geo target to UK and then keep checking it.
no matter what anyone tells you there are many factors to consider and the ONLY sure way is to monitor specific factors for YOUR site.

BTW@ I see too many ‘experts’ saying do this, do that, that has no effect. Like domain name has no affect? PLEASE, Rob ( I mean this as very friendly advice) do not state these things as dismissive facts especially when you are wrong. Yes you are wrong!
My company crunches over 1 million informational transactions an hour to track Google algorithms from 10 global & geo data centres and I can actually tell you that today, at this point in time on Google UK Local & Global indexes, domain name CAN be a factor. It is small in some cases so hard to see , in others it is far more significant. But it can be a factor.

@ Everyone -
Google algorithm uses many factors (you know a lot of the big ones), what people fail to understand is that it can change the proportional importance of these factors dynamically in many instances. It is not 1 single equation that sits stagnant for all to see…

Be very careful of people who SEO half a dozen sites and give you advice on what works and what doesn’t. They often sift through the web and try very hard to work out the best SEO methods, they then use trial and error and a handful of results to draw conclusions about billions of pages and how they are ranked! No, no and no…

No offence is intended to anyone here, just be careful that your advice is true for ALL scenarios. Especially if you state that it is 100% TRUE.

IMHO: It’s often better to say, for me it doesn’t appear to be a factor and then quantify your experience, for example ‘I have 4 sites with 30K pages and I rank top 10 for 500 keywords on the Google Local Index.’

I’ll quantify myself a bit further I own a company that has some corporate clients with turnovers in the billions of pounds. They take their SEO VERY seriously and we have to know our techniques as facts because a micron in the wrong direction can cost millions.

Anyway, good luck to all SEO’s and keep trying and keep learning. Never a day goes by where we don’t learn something new in our company. Sometimes it’s tiny sometimes it’s of Gaussian proportions but we never know it all, i never say we do or think we do and I’M fairly sure we never will. As long as we know more than our competitors we’ll do all right. :-)

Good luck, M

@matthew oxley – great comment, I read the SEOmoz alt tag report and in retrospect probably gave it more weight than I should have.

How would you relate your comments back to Patrick’s original post though? It looks pretty conclusive to me that the dials in the algorithm have been turned to increase the weight of branded search volumes as Patrick suggests.

@matthew oxley very good points Matthew and I concur except I’d like to pick up the following comment you made “The problem I have with mathematical studies, which I find fascinating, is that people take correlation as a fact.”

If done correctly then a mathematical fact is a fact. But where many go wrong is they do involve assumption. Mathematically speaking the example of the” alt tag” can be proven (just as an example) as counter productive even though it’s in a high ranking page. But you have hit one of the ‘page 1′ SEO errors made. SEO’s often look at the highest ranking competitors and assume that all they do is correct.

@richard I think the original article completely lacks any valuable proof. What goes in any index and the algorithmic issues of how it comes back out are unproven by this article. It’s pretty much ALL assumption. It may be a fact but there is absolutely no ‘conclusive’ evidence to say so in the article. Don’t get me wrong it’s a nice article and I liked reading it, but it is just a bit of a guess at the end of the day.

From our approach there is no conclusive evidence that this is true. I should add that we do measure and incorporate several parameters where there is no evidence of them being part of the Google Algorithm. But you of course you do have to keep your eye on them.

Ultimately if my company devise our map of the Google algorithm from analysis of millions of facts then we can do our SEO job to it’s most beneficial where allowable (we have several clients who just don’t allow some techniques so we have to live with it). BUT that’s still guessing and so I will now try to demonstrate (without giving too much away) how we develop a mathematical proof of the Google Algorithm.
A mathematical proof is different to all other sciences in that it IS proven. Most other sciences are based on the facts to hand and empirical data and this is where we struggle with Google’s algorithm as ALL we have is empirical data. However once we have established our empirical data we build our own algorithm and then attempt to disprove it. So we use a common mathematical method of proof by contradiction (reduction toward the absurd).

I’m afraid the original article and 99% of SEO advice I see is merely based on empirical evidence and as such is by any other words a best guess based on a limited observation. The people who make the statements as facts are simply naive in not knowing how to prove a fact in the first place. Either that or they are on an ego trip to be a well followed SEO guru. You can find those characters everywhere you look. I usually prefer to observe them and watch the sheep follow, but occaisionally I like to chip in. :-)

As I stated before my only criticism of SEO’s is their ability to state a guess like it’s a fact. I encourage all the debate around SEO as long as it’s stated as I’m guessing. The author of the article on this page like many other SEO’s gets ‘dangerously close’ to telling people to try to become a brand authority. Although in fairness he does use the word ‘theory’ so he does not actually say it. Pretty well written if you read it carefully, that doesn’t mean it contains many facts of course. :-)

Mike I’m not saying any of this is fact, just an interesting observation based on the limited data we have. Also correlation does not imply causation. I hope that anybody intelligent enough to be able to experiment with this stuff is also intelligent enough to understand that it’s a theory rather than fact.

@Mike I fear that Google might be reducing the effectiveness of building your own algorithm as they appear to be increasingly focusing on data that is hidden from us. While we can go as far pulling link data, spidering sites, analysing the information from the internet that we can get to, we simply don’t have sufficient access to Google’s organic & paid search term data, toolbar data and what they know about user behaviour on our sites. This surely means that increasingly we’ll need to rely on our gut and as @matthew oxley suggests, read, hypothesise, test and rationalise

@Mike LOL I’ve never thought of SEO like the joke about the two men seeing a tiger running towards them, one putting on a pair of running shoes, and the other saying ‘but you’ll never outrun a tiger!’ and the first replying ‘i don’t need to outrun a tiger, I need to outrun YOU!’. Interesting thoughts, & thanks for the algorithmic insights….

I agree with Matthew “SEO is nearly always about opinion.”

@Mike, my friend my comment regarding “Keywords in a domain name, does not actually have any SEO value”, was not intended as a fact but merely my opinion.

I should have said it more clearly.

I thank Mr SEO Doctor for his evidence to support his opinion.

I feel better now Doc!

I guess it is one of the way Google give ranking to. If many people search for the same keyword all the time, it means something to Google.

This was a very interesting and thought provoking analysis. It certainly makes sense to some extent, but the real question is if the brand related search volume triggers the visibility for general searches in that niche, or the brand authority related to the niche is what triggers the brand searches to be flagged as related in Google Insights. http://www.woodburningstoves.co.uk I think either could be the case.