What if my brand name is my keyword?

[daviddischler]

Referencing the new 'over optimization' penalties.. What if your company name was "Buy a Burrito" and your website website was buyaburrito.com (not a real site), and your main keyphrase was "buy a burrito".  Will Google treat all Branded Terms as exact or phrase match keywords and penalize you?

[Qon]

This is called a "exact match" domain name, and a lot has been written about the subject. From my experience Google will most likely not treat it as a branded keyword in the beginning. When you are ranking #1 for your term and there are sitelinks under your domain name, then it's a different story.

But even if you don't have an EMD your linkbuilding techniques should still be the same;

• Get diverse backlinks. Some social, some blogs, some directories, you know the game!
• Don't build links to only 1 page (like your Homepage)
• Change around the anchor text

Edit: Grammar.

[daviddischler]

Thanks for the response, but the diversity of locations doesn't answer the problem. Those links, if I am linking as branding, would be exact matches to my keyword.  So in the anchor text diversity examples some professionals give of:

40% Branding
40% Random
20% Keyword

that would automatically make the branding fit in the category of Keyword which gives:

60% Keyword
40% Random

How do we know that Google knows the difference?  I'm not just referencing the domain name... but more importantly, the business name is the same as the keyword, which gives the branding issue.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi David,

Google's semantic processing has gotten pretty sophisticated - If the name of the website is on every page and is the URL, and also makes up a significant portion of the anchor text, those are all pretty clear signals that "this is the name of the site."

With an exact match domain you want to make it clear that you're not a fly-by-night site just set up to quickly take advantage of a single keyword.  Some ways to do this are:

• Make sure you have deep content on every page - Panda can be particularly brutal to EMDs.
• REALLY watch your usage of your brand name - give it the "read out loud" test to see if you're using it too much and giving the appearance of keyword stuffing.
• Optimize non-home-page pages for other, related keywords and create content accordingly
• Build a history of social mentions - search engines look to social mentions and interactions as proof that "this is a real company."
• Focus less on anchor text when building links, and more on creating sharable content that people want to link to. People will be more likely to use your keyword as anchor text than would be typical, since it's already the name of the site, so I would focus link building efforts on other keywords and just on general link volume, even if the anchor text is "click here."

Basically, do everything you can to show Google that you're a legit site that deserves to rank, and not a keyword spammer.

[daviddischler]

That makes sense. So basically the answer is that Google is smart enough to tell that it is your actual business name, and not a website you bought to rank with.  Thanks!