Has Google Increased Its Preference Toward Brands?

There has been a lot of chatter lately regarding the news that Google’s ranking algorithm now prefers established brands more than in the past. If true, this would give sites owned by big brands a large and sudden boost in the search engine’s rankings. With all the speculation going around, Matt Cutts posted a YouTube video to discuss the recent changes.

Cutts’ explained the recent algorithm update as more about the elements that go into a brand like trust, authority, reputation, Pagerank, and quality than being about brands themselves. The adjustment that was made is referred to internally as “Vince’s Change” and was not big enough to constitute a full “update”. Cutts noted that Google makes 300 to 400 of these types of changes each year to its ranking algorithms.

The clear theme of Cutt’s video comments was that webmasters should continue to strive for the same thing as before, quality. High-quality websites will continue to be well respected in the Google rankings and should continue to receive organic traffic. He claims that the number of sites affected by any of Google’s algorithm changes is typically minor.