Brand queries as a ranking signal?

[CommT]

Hi folks,

I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this.

I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this?

Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this...

I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this.

Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would?

Best wishes,

Amelia

PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me

[Andy-Halliday]

first of all I am glad I am not the only person who thinks about this before sleep (its when I come up with my crazy ideas and thoughts) - tip, have a notebook next to you otherwise you might forget by the morning.

I've never seen any direct correlation between this and I would guess it would be very hard to prove either way, but I would tend to agree.

Google wants to rank sites which are more popular and answer their users experience, so if a lot of people are searching for 'x' and search term. I.e. 'bbc televisions' and someone else did a search for televisions, I wouldn't be surprised to see bbc ranking higher as a lot of people had suddenly been searching for the site. The only caveat I would add would be, that if your site has a poor user experience and a lot of people search brand name an query and bounce, you would probably rank lower.

I have never seen any evidence for this, however its not a silly question / thought.

[CommT]

Phew... I'm not weird!!!

Thanks for your comment, you raise a good point about bad user experience. I'm looking at stuff to improve ours, but tbh it's not that bad... I need to look at our longtail landing pages in better detail, but our main core pages have low bounce rates which I take as being a positive thing.

I used to work for a company that had a subsidiary company that did online videos, the premise for selling the videos to SEO clients was that if people watch a video then bounce rate goes down and dwell time goes up, which is a good thing for rankings... Been thinking about this as an option, but it's expensive to get GOOD videos. (I don't mean over-priced, I mean out of my price range).

Amelia

[iSTORM-New-Media]

I feel this would detract from Google's entire PageRank algorithm, if they were to base popularity off search query data. Although this would be really hard to test because as the popularity of the brand query grows so will other factors like links and anchor text. It would be really hard to tell what is affecting what.

A related study was done on the impact of brand mentions: http://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions ...But these are not tied to brand query data alone.

Where you might find some interesting insights is how universal search is affected by query popularity. I.e. the influence of news results or in-depth articles as a particular query grows in interest.

[CommT]

I thought pagerank algorithm was largely redundant these days? But good points, thank you!

Yes, I am very interested in universal search.