Respond to Google's trend towards branding ranking?

I have seen it happening in my industry.

Now for a very competitive keyword, my site used to rank on the first page along with a couple of other sites A, B, C

Now, for this keyword, i have seen a drop of ranking for my site and also site A, B, C, which all have been ranked very well for this competitive keyword. Instead, some big brands who used to rank on the 2nd page, now all get to the 1st page of Google. I can see that Google weights more towards "branding" on ranking

How should we respond and compete with "big brand names"? Any thoughts/suggestions?

Thank you

 

Become a Big Brand Name...I don't know what else you can do. Google, like the public, trust these brands, so they get more attention...it's just a fact.

 

ongoing seo efforts help u in that case

 

I would respond by targeting your efforts on more keywords and phrases. Have at least 10 great keywords/keyphrases covered along with working to get your site back up. You can surely do it as I see little sites doing way better than brand name ones. Good luck!

 

you need to work for more no of keywords

 

I've noticed this too, with some concern. I do think the only way to compete is to remain steady in your efforts.

 

its bad.They are making more tough even for legit people who want to start websites and give out real content.

 

Most of keyword search result have the wikipedia website. wikipedia is the trusted website for Google

 

Maybe you should consider spending more efforts in your link building campaigns, trying to target your domain name nor your company / product name instep to make them as a known brand names link to your own business / website names as brands

 

The focus will be on selling your brand:

http://firetown.com/2009/05/25/google-algorithm-change-focus-on-branding/

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/04/20/google-set-to-change-ranking-algorithm

New Thread for Google Algorithm Change on : http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1356306

 

Just curious, but do you have stronger keyword density, more pages, and more/better quality backlinks than these big names if so there is really nothing you can do other than attempting to corner a smaller corner of your niche where the big brands do not have a stragle hold.

 

It's not that Google is favoring the big brand name sites, as much as it is they have the proper foundation laid and authoritative back-linking required more and more by Google to get listed under those competitive key terms. Bigger, older, higher linked to sites are becoming the trusted sites for search engine results. Blame the spammers and black hatter, but if you want to play ball, you have to play by their rules, just have to deal with it and beef up your back linking, improve your content, and work at less saturated key terms.

 

thanks for all the comments. I think a it is better now to focus on branding when doing the link building, eg, instead of going with the anchor of a certain keyword, use your brand name as the anchor text

 

You may want to focus more on long tailed keywords rather than the ones now being dominated by the big brands.

 

I been ranking #2 for a very competitive keyword for more then a year, then recently I see some drop.

This kind of diminishes the need for dedicated seo works, rather on page content would work better to establish the better serp.

 

All the big brand companies have big link buying budgets. There's a lesson in there for everyone.

 

With the rate at which new sites are appearing on the web for competitive terms, it is time for google to do something about it. Branded websites will only come up for the generic keywords, not for the long tail ones because most of these branded websites focus only on the primary keyword (the one at the core of their business). However they fail to target related searches for the same keyword. That's why other content websites which has information on a range of topics around the same keyword will always do better.

If you guys have not heard about amazon's marketing strategy, here it is:

You make profit by not selling the most popular item but by selling a lot of the less popular ones.

most popular - competive keywords (branded names)
less popular - long tail keywords (few searches per day)

 

thanks for the inputs, i think you are right. maybe we just cannot compete with big brands for generic/competitive terms.