fred9989 - 8:54 am on Apr 28, 2012 (gmt 0)

To recap Cain's post:

The only definitive correlation I see in rankings and this update is the effect of branding and inbound links to brands. -Exact match domains are not all penalized -Affiliate websites are not all penalized -Lots of sites with poor links are penalized, yet some are not Most brands have: - A higher value proposition - Well written content - Social and community stickiness - Signals which support a logical company - Naturally built inbound links Eventually there will easily be enough non-generic brands to cover page one Google for almost any known vertical. I believe that is the direction we are headed.

And even if this is true, the results are a disaster, at least in my field. For a query, "how to prevent x" (where x is a personal health type problem) the disaster looks like this:

Disaster =
1) Amazon - a book on the subject
2) E-M-D.net with hyphens (66 links from 12 blogs, mostly comment spam)
3) WebMD (a big brand of the kind G loves, but arguably providing superficial, not authoritative information)
4) Yahoo answers (well, it is a brand...of a sort)
5) EMD1.com (31 backlinks from 15 domains - blog spam)
6) Menshealth.us (glib, superficial magazine type coverage of the subject)
7) A hacked .edu domain selling
8) You Tube - I didn't bother to watch it
9) books.google.com › Health & Fitness › General (well, it is a brand!)
10) spammy domain with thousands of backlinks from (hacked? sold?) Chinese government domain

There's quality, eh?

[edited by: goodroi at 3:28 pm (utc) on Apr 30, 2012]