I recently gave a presentation on the Search Congres in Amsterdam. One of the bullets in my slides contained "mentions" as a possible ranking signal, following the recent correlation studies by Moz and Search Metrics. I explained that Google probably used mentions of a brandname to determine the popularity. One of the visitors asked me a question i couldn't answer: "What if my brandname is also a commonly used word?" For example, the brand could be; RED, a manufacturer of professional production cameras, with the URL www.red.com. Mentions for red.com and www.red.com can be monitored and assigned to the brand perfectly, but what about the word "red"? How would Google handle this signal, if half of it is missing because it matches with a common word?
I think if you got mentions of a brandname and that same brandname is also a commonly used word, Google have to deal with it manualy. The best example I could give to you is "Apple", a very common name... but if you do a research with it, you won't find anything about fruits on the first page. It's all about accuracy and what people are looking for... fron what I heard, they are not capable of doing this automatically, they have to do it manually... AKA Google's search quality team
Hi there GooMarv, I did not want to take Apple as an example because of the magnitude of the brand, this obviously becomes an exception on everything. I dont think that Google would check every mention manually to determine if its about "Apple Inc.", or simply an apple. This is the reason i took a smaller brand like RED, they are more comparable with your every day brand. But still, the same problem exists here, loss of a "clean" signal for Google. Could it be, that the subject, main keyword etc. of the page that the mention is on is taken into the measurement? Or could it be, that when this problem occurs, the mention signal is ignored as a factor in the algo for this URL?
I aggree that the example of "Apple" is a little bit too much but you'll find other examples easely... it's just a matter of trust (Domain name, Brand, etc.) and relevancy You can check : "Orange" => color + fruit... How to be trusted by Google ? 1 - Being in place for a long time : +5 years at least (time is a factor) 2 - Being popular (Receive a lots of mentions, likes, shares, links, etc... from different sources : forums, blogs, articles, facebook, twitter, etc.) 3 - Avoid Spammy techniques It's a matter of time... If you want "red" to rank above the film or the color in the serps.
I agree on the points that you give, are the points that eventually lead to getting ranked on the common word. I am interested in the specific problem of mentions as a signal, and a brandname matching with a common word.
Mentions must be one of those Google signals that are really difficult to understand. For me, Google put each website into a category (business for example). If one of the pages mentions "Red", it will be linked with business related subjects. Those mentions could be benefic for your website if "Red.com" is the leading website in business category... What you think about that?