Online Brands and Google’s Vince Update

April 8, 2009
 

Today on SEM Synergy we focus on branding and the Vince algorithm change. Bruce, Virginia and Christopher open the show by discussing how establishing trust, authority and quality is vital on the Web. Chris says that establishing a long-term value position of expertise among your market is the key to branding. Bruce says that a company doesn’t have to be a brand to be an expert in the field or to be relevant to a query. He thinks characteristics like longevity or fast servers could actually responsible for brands just naturally performing better.

Jayme Westervelt

Jayme Westervelt of Simply Optimized then talks to Virginia about ranking shifts she saw among her clients over the last few months. Jayme compares the changes among those sites with a strong branding focus and those that are more general in content. Among her clients, she always recommends a strategy that covers highly-targeted and more broad terms in order to cover the search spectrum and to please clients who refuse to give up on the very competitive terms.

Then Susan and Fernando debate their perceptions of the target goal of the update. Fernando proposes that changes to the algorithm may have included increasing the value of link age or decreasing the value of anchor text while raising the value of the page theme. Susan argues that trust and authority are the qualities of a brand. So even though Google said they didn’t boost brands, they did in fact boost qualities of brands.