What do search engines consider brand signals?

[RogerElliott]

After being hit by the Penguin stick, like good content marketers we are trying to focus on improving brand signals for our site. But I keep coming up against what exactly brand signals are.

I can understand that if you are called 'Ziggle' and someone links to you with that in anchor text or mentions that name, that would be a brand signal. But we're on a generic domain (descriptive of the produt type), so what would constitute brand signals in our case?

[BenRWoodard]

Social networks, citation sites, and local directories would probably be a good place to start.  Since I began a social campaign for one of my (non)brands I've seen a big improvementsin rankings for branded results.

It is really interesting to see you pose your question this way.  We have been seeing all the big dogs say that the exact match TLD is going to matter less and less over the coming years.  I wonder if this is an indirect attack on that form of SERP manipulation.  (note: I'm not saying you were trying to manipulate anything but that is the general use of generic TLDs)

[Adam.Whittles]

Let's say your brand is 'Ziggle' and your website is http://www.keywords.com then you could simply use 'Ziggle' or 'Ziggle Inc.' or 'http://www.keywords.com' or 'www.keywords.com' as your brand anchors.

Your website, even though it has keywords in it, is still regarded as a brand signal albeit not as strong a signal as just 'Ziggle'. Of course if you just used the commercial keywords as your anchor without the web address, then this is not good.

Ultimately, the point of the Penguin update is over-optimization, that is a very unnatural looking link profile. Therefore you have to ask what anchors to your site would look natural? It is of course absolutely natural to have anchors that contain your entire web address (http://www.keywords.com) even though it has keywords in the domain. Again, it does not look natural when anchors have been over-optimized with keyword rich commercial terms.

Personally, I try to avoid using exact match domains wherever possible.

Hope this helps.

Adam.

[RogerElliott]

Thanks Ben. Are you're saying that social signals to a page on the site would be considered a brand signal?

[RogerElliott]

Thanks Adam. That's interesting - so a link with http://www.keywords.com as the link text is considered a brand signal. That makes sense.

Would you say then that a link with 'Keywords' as the anchor pointing at http://www.keywords.com would be considered a brand signal? This is where it gets fuzzy for me. Clearly, a generic description phrase cannot be claimed as a brand trademark in legal terms, but I'm not sure if the delineation is as stark in the view of the engines.

In our case, our brand is effectively Keywords(.com) which is great if we end up getting the 'Hoover' effect, but not so great if it prevents us from creating a brand strong enough for Google. And of course, as branding decisions go, it was a bad one. Damn you Google and your former preference for exact matches. Damn me and my former preference for easy wins.

One signal we saw on this was that we used to get sitelinks for our generic phrase - in other words, Google considered us the brand for that phrase. That stopped probably 2 years ago and hasn't reappeared since. We still rank 1 for the phrase of course, but that is not as good as being considered a strong brand in our market.

[BenRWoodard]

As far as I can tell, social is a big part of the authentication process and filter of Google for Brand signals.  If you establish solid (not spam) social accounts with your brand identity then, yes, I am saying that will help with branding.

A good way to test is by searching your "brand" in google and see what shows up.

[RogerElliott]

Thanks for clarifying that Ben. Tell me, how would Google know which Facebook page to associate with your site - I am guessing simply the one that you link to from the site?

[BenRWoodard]

That would be my assumption.  I'm sure there is some value placed on the links you place from your Facebook page timeline as well but not as much.  I would consider this type of stuff to be "signals" not direct brand ranking factors that Google would see.  Signals are the first step though and seem to be having a big impact on my client's brand recognition.

[RogerElliott]

Got it, thanks for taking the time to explain that Ben.

[Adam.Whittles]

'Would you say then that a link with 'Keywords' as the anchor pointing at http://www.keywords.com would be considered a brand signal?'

Not unless the brand/company name is 'Keywords' also. Even then I would be tempted to use any identifying business extension such as Inc, Ltd etc. So as an example,

Business is called 'Electric Fan Services' website is 'http://www.electricfanservices.com' and main keyword phrase is 'electric fan services' I would make sure the majority of anchors are either 'Electric Fan Services' or 'http://www.electricfanservices.com'. If the business was actually 'Electric Fan Services Ltd.' I would probably adjust the anchor text term accordingly.

Adam.

[RogerElliott]

Great example in the Electric Fan Services thanks Adam, it applies directly to our situation. We have Keyword Ltd in the footer (as that is actually our registered company name). The trick now will be to see how we can get Keyword Ltd in anchor text. I smell some guest posts approaching.

[riplash]

Another key brand signal in my mind (and if it's not, it should be) is people searching for your brand name, or brand name + anchor, in Google to find you, for example SEOmoz must get a lot of traffic every day for people searching "SEOmoz", "SEOmoz rank tracker", etc.

This is obviously more difficult for Google to determine if your brand is also an exact match anchor phrase.

One way to strengthen the signal is to use a search phrase instead of a URL in your real world/print marketing. This could sometimes take a little SEO groundwork to do, but for example, if you are Electric Fan Services Ltd and you have a promo for Honeywell fans, instead of using the URL on your print marketing, add a footer saying something like, "Google 'electric fan services honeywell promo' to discover the deals".

[RogerElliott]

That's an interesting idea riplash, I had thought before that a search for our domain with or without the .com might be considered a brand signal - that is, rather than the search being 'keyword1 keyword2' the search is performed as 'keyword1keyword2'. It seems that if that is the case, encouraging search in offline could feed into that.

[riplash]

I was about to edit my original post to include it, but check out this Feb 2011 article from Rand - he writes specifically about brand signals in some detail.

Lately, I've noticed some big multinationals using search phrases in TV campaigns instead of URLs. I assumed it was largely an SEO play to strengthen brand signals, although some of it could be to do with cutting costs (of creating satellite sites for a promo, maintaining hundreds of random promo-specific domains, etc).

[RogerElliott]

I'd forgotten about that post, nice one, and it usefully widens the scope of brand signals.