Is Vince in the UK?

The recent Vince update to Google, where generic terms become associated to brands even if they are not specifically targeting a keyword has caused much consternation in the SEO community. In the US the changes were noticed as far back as Feb. Aaron Wall has shown some evidence for brands being pushed up by the change when it happened in the US.

The update was supposed to have be rolled out to the UK on Sunday, 29th June, 2009. Looking at the search results in the UK for generic items there is scarce evidence for a preference for well known brand names associated with generic queries. It could be that the other factors are swamping the effect.

If such an effect was a strong factor,  hamburgers,  associated brands: McDonalds, Burger King, etc.

Cars: insert your favour brand of car.

What is a brand anyway? It is a name that becomes associated with a particular product.  Good brands become synonymous with the product such as Adidas, McDonalds, BMW. But every brand faces the same challenge of becoming associated with a particular product and has a reputation to maintain. Brands require time to become well known.How to become a brand? Improved marketing and time.

I there is a change that favour brands, it seems to be an emergent property of a change that rewards trust and authority of sites.

What factors might be used to assess this authority? This is speculation of course from the reasonable to the improbable.

• Domain Age
• Links from other authoritative sites – do brands get better quality links linking to them? Probably.
• Number of domains held. Large companies often own many top level domains with the same domain name.
• Domain name or Brand Name as anchor text  – the reverse  SEO tactics where anchor text is the keyword they want to rank for.
• Shared  or dedicated hosting – big brands not likely to use shared hosting?
• PPC factors – Google denies a link between PPC and ranking it is conceivable that the keywords bid for. Do they bid on their own brand
• Data collected through Analytics? Map Keyword -> Sites to associate brand with product.
• Social media – how well do people identify different brands and associate them with products to create brand awareness.

How to Combat the Effect of Vince

i) go for more specific terms that are more targeted but have lower search volume.

ii) increase trustworthiness of site through relevant links.