no it was never...had it been a factor then small businesses would have never made it to get exposure on Google and that too on the first page
do you understand what branding means??? are you getting what is written in the page whose URL have posted?can you give example of a SEO success story which had a great brand actually big brands never need SEO work to be done for them
The implications of this are interesting - now we need to find out of google manually rewards brands it sees as authoratitive, or if there is an algorithm that is looking for certains things that point to a "brand" worth rewarding.
but don't you think that it would be unfair on Google's part if it does so...if some start up company is launching its products or services, it will be nearly impossible for it to get on the top results although they may be doing good or providing good products or services.
Hey shailendra...here no body is talking about SEO techniques..we are discussing on the point whether branding of a website makes any impact in the search engine rankings?? Whether Google gives them an edge over advantage as compared to general websites?? How you will define the term branding... In online arena, branding of a website could be easily termed by its visibility over internet. If a website has a good branding label that simply means that that website has been posted on thousands of websites and people are talking about that website over social media websites and their blogs. So at the end what website gets, more back links and more visitors!! And in my opinion these two factors are enough to get ranked a website over search engines...
small business does SEO because they do not have the budgets larger companies, when you have a brand you do not need seo as people know who you are and type your url in directly.... in small business you must worry about branding all the time so the correct message goe to your potential customers... overall not much which is new in the article....
If true, it's just another shameful move from Google engineers. Right now we can check lots of "brand" big companies delivering lousy results = nocontent results in top spots.
I have read the content already, what I wanted to let you know that branding is not the only reason for the rankings, however, a website should be optimized at a extent. If you check the examples of the article, you will find that the results from the query "airline tickets" shows some prominent brand name like delta and united airlines. And if you check these websites, you will find that these websites are also optimized(not 100 %, but the keywords are in the title and content). I am not denying the fact what aroon wall wrote in his post. However, I have some confusions on it like if the Google is promoting the brands in search engine rankings, then why not it shows airindia website in search results(in India) for the keyword "airline tickets", you will find only one brand name there ie GOair and you could easily find the reason why that website is there..