Google rates digital PR
Patrick Altoft has blogged about an update Google has launched today. In the past, brands had to rely on link-building and SEO techniques to boost their Google rankings. Now, Google seems to taking much more notice of trust and authority.
Patrick lists a number of factors which he believes will improve Google ranking for brands:
- Mentions in the mainstream media - how much does Google look at mentions rather than links in the authority algorithm?
- Links from mainstream media sites to your homepage - the best indication of trust Google has
- Buzz & mentions of your brand - again, how many people are talking about you?
- Search volume for your brand - how many people search for your brand directly?
- Traffic data - how many visitors do you get outside search?
- Related search volume - how many people search for "confused.com" and "car insurance" in the same session?
The top three are directly connected to good PR and word of mouth practice. Over the last year, we've seen a significant up-take in clients subscribing to a service their SEO or media agency call digital PR. This is actually the process of putting meaningless content on unknown web sites, in the hope that Google can be tricked into thinking that the clients' site is significantly linked. Thankfully, this practice may be obsolete. It certainly does our clients' brands no favours.
It seems that Google has recognised what we've been saying for a while. Digital content reflects the real world media market. Consumers will look in the main for a trusted and well regarded channel to serve their content. The fact that Google will now reward those brands that have the ability to create content within those more mainstream channels creates a fantastic opportunity for PR. We have a very clear benefit to offer our clients, because digital coverage will definitively boost Google ranking. Above that, we have proof that word of mouth in the digital channels is so important that Google takes real notice of it.
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Mister Wong
Comments
This is a really important change in the emphasis on the rankings in Google. It's something I have seen coming for a while, which is that how your customer perceive, talk and comment about your company / brand will have a direct impact on rankings. With the launch of search wiki back in November, that was the 1st wave of changes to come through.
Will be interesting to see how these trends continue, as I see the emphasis growing.
Great update - thanks for unearthing this one. I don't think this info has been recognised by the SEO community yet. I was at a business link seminar yesterday, where none of this was mentioned.
Google's giving particular credit to digg.com, one of the leading social bookmarking sites. Google loves links from the leading blogs in your particular industry, relevance is still the key, so as noted giving people something worth talking about is one of the most effective SEO techniques.
Direct inbound links do still play an important part of SEO strategies, it's only recipricol linking which has been abused and is now redundant.
The main new development for Google, which is also great for digital PR, is to increase the richness of your site. Google's acknowledged that to some degree it has detracted from users experience due to content and text heavy sites being overly favoured in the past. Google now actively rewards engaging media such as video or flash content. Google's been scanning flash content for some time and has recently released a deeper search to improve its importance.