Google’s Search Liaison answered a question at Google Search Central Live NYC about whether Google prefers brands. Sullivan took that as an opportunity to affirm that Google is working to show more independent sites and also offered insights into how independent sites can improve their search performance.
Google Wants Good Independent Sites To Rank
Someone at the Search Central Live NYC event submitted a question asking whether Google was focusing on just showing a smaller set of sites from the Internet that’s limited to big brand sites. Danny Sullivan, aka Google Search Liaison, immediately responded, no. He responded that he understands that there’s a sense that big brands always rank well on Google and that many people say that Google only wants to show big brands.
Google Search Central Live New York City
Sullivan acknowledged that this is a valid concern from small independent sites because there are many who are doing good work who aren’t ranking as well as they should be and explained that they were working on it.
The following is a paraphrase based on my notes:
“And we’ve been spending a lot of time (and we’re going to continue to spend a lot of time) to understand how can we do a better job on better understanding and perhaps guiding some of the smaller creators and small independent sites so they can be successful. It has been like a huge chunk of my time over the past year. And I’m not alone in it.
We were just in Zurich last week. We were just out there and we were looking at a bunch of real queries from small creators, independent sites and sitting with the ranking team and going through them and what’s happening here and …we made a note that you know, we have done some changes that we think help and we have done some changes that have helped. We also anticipate working through the whole rest of the year.”
Why Changes Are Incremental
Danny explained that independent sites and their topic areas vary widely which complicates applying a single algorithmic solution to help them all. That explains why Google keeps saying they’re making incremental changes.
According to my notes, he said:
“One of the things I would say is I don’t expect you’re going to suddenly see one day we do a big huge, ‘And here is the independent small site update’ type of thing. I think it’s going be these incremental things that we do, in part because these kinds of sites are not monolithic.”
That Thing You Need To Know About Brands
Danny discussed how serious they are about finding solutions for independent publishers and eventually began speaking of more tangible things that publishers can do to help themselves, specifically about becoming memorable to site visitors.
This is something that I’ve been doing for over twenty years. I never rolled out an affiliate or AdSense site that didn’t have a carefully planned domain name, logo and mascot in place. That mascot is super important because it helps make the site memorable to site users. They’ll forget the domain name but they’ll remember that mascot and the site.
Danny said that Google’s systems are not tuned to identify big brands and rank them well. He acknowledged that sites with a lot of branded searches might rank well and this is the point where it felt like okay, am I really hearing this? It’s the kind of information you come to these events for.
This is a paraphrase from my notes of what Danny said:
“And I’ve seen where people do research and say, ‘I’ve figured out that if you have a lot of branded searches…’ That’s kind of valid in some sense.
But it’s not like you have a lot of big branded searchers or small branded searchers or whatever and you’re finding that correlates to your traffic. What it’s saying is that people have recognized you as a brand, which is a good thing. We like brands. Some brands we don’t like, but at least we recognize them, right?
So if you’re trying to be found in the sea of content and you have the 150,000th fried chicken recipe, it’s very difficult to understand which ones of those are necessarily better than anybody else’s out there.
But if you are recognized as a brand in your field, big, small, whatever, just a brand, then that’s important.
That correlates with a lot of signals of perhaps success with search. Not that you’re a brand but that people are recognizing you. People may be coming to you directly, people, may be referring to you in lots of different ways… You’re not just sort of this anonymous type of thing.
So, one thing I would encourage anybody, but especially to smaller and independent ones that are kind of feeling like the big brands are kind of getting it all is, are you making sure that people understand who you are?”
Differentiate Yourself. A Lot.
Danny Sullivan discussed that users submitted over 13,000 sites with feedback about Google’s algorithm and claimed that he’s confident that he’s looked at more sites than any SEO in the audience has. He acknowledged that many of the submissions had valid concerns but he also said he noticed that some sites that were high quality also lacked that extra bit that made them different and better.
What he was referring to, in my words, not Danny’s, was a clear narrative on the page that lets site visitors know who is behind the site. He wasn’t talking about the sidebar with the bio and a photo that travel and recipe sites all have. He was talking about something that goes beyond the generic narrative that many bloggers use.
This is a paraphrase from my notes about what Danny said:
“I can land on a site and have no idea who runs the site, what the site is about. Who’s behind it? That’s not to say that if you put an ‘about us’ link on your site that now you’ll rank better. But people come to websites from Search and they don’t know what they’re getting into.”
He then contrasted social media to search to show how a forum or a social media site offers a carefully curated experience where you know where everything is at, where expectations are managed. He then said that Search is completely different. While Danny didn’t explicitly say this, I believe what he meant to communicate was that the randomness of sites that Google sends people to can be jarring to users who consequently aren’t sure whether to trust a site. It’s a different experience than the carefully curated experience of a forum or social media site and for that reason it’s important to be able to give a sense of who is behind the site.
This is a paraphrase of what Danny said:
“Search is nothing like that. Search is a grab bag. It’s weird. You don’t know what you’re going to get. It’s like I’m feeling lucky. You don’t know what you’re going to end up with.”
And please, I beg you, especially those of you that said that Google wants everything to be the same. That’s not what we want. We don’t want every website to be a cookie cutter site.
We want you to build websites that you think makes sense for your readers.
Anytime you ever have a question about what you should be doing to be successful in Google search and your answer is to ask if it’s a good thing for your readers, if you do that, you are aligning with the things we’re trying to do because we’re trying to send people to satisfying content so that they go, ‘This was great! This is wonderful, I loved it!’
So when they wind up on your website, probably for the first time and they don’t know you from anything and they’re coming from this crazy world where they don’t even know where the profiling for the author is, make it easy for them. Make it easy for them to come into the site and know exactly what you’re about.
I know the travel bloggers, you all have the thing on the side that says, ‘we love travelling the world…’ It’s like, OK, that’s fine and at least people know to expect that from travel bloggers and you’ve got it there.
But help them understand what’s unique or different about you, that makes you a brand. And that is a really good thing.”
Insights From Search Central Live NYC
Google Actively Supports Independent Sites
Danny Sullivan said multiple times that Google is spending a significant amount of time into improving the algorithm so that more independent publishers will attain visibility in search. However these improvements are incremental because of the wide variety of sites and topics makes it so that one change won’t affect all sites equally.
Brand Recognition Drives Search Success
Being recognized as a brand to site visitors is a quality that highly successful sites tend to have. It’s not that cultivating a brand is a ranking factor, but rather that cultivating site users leads to stronger search signals.
Differentiation Is Important
Some high-quality sites fail to stand out because they do what they think they do what everyone else is doing. Site visitors may appreciate more effort to make it clearer who is behind the site. An example of something to consider avoiding are things like rote generic bios in favor of providing a real sense of why the site is important or matters.
Clarity Builds Trust
Recognize that the web has an element of randomness that make some site visitors wary about visiting a site for the first time. Design with this understanding in mind.
Design for the Reader, Not the Algorithm
One of the most common mistakes I see by publishers is that they can list all of the things they did for SEO but very little if anything that they did for their site visitors. Danny Sullivan recommends basing decisions on whether a change is good for the site visitors because that will align it with the kinds of sites Google wants to rank.