Evidence that "Branda" is possibly not to boost all brands

[whatson]

I have been looking at other major internet brands, some that are even public companies, even billion dollar companies, that do have established brands, and have suffered the Panda wrath. They have not only had their alexa rankings drop, but their share price too has dropped accordingly.

And then there are the companies that did not get panda, and have had their alexa and stock prices rise.

So, if even these billion dollar conglomerates with well branded sites get hit, then there must be more to it than that. Were they in fact also providing too thin content? Were they scraping content from other sites, or purchasing data feeds that are used by others?

This does somewhat debunk the theory of brands winning. Again there are also other sites that have no brand at all, but have in-depth content, and were not impacted.

[MrSavage]

With respect to everyone, I appreciate reading various takes with the ultimate goal to understand Google 2.0 or Google 2011 etc.

I do think that part of the problem is that brand to me isn't brand to someone else. So to me, when I speak of "brand", I'm really referring to a mega site. And by mega site, think of it simplistically. A mega site is the NFL team.

And further, Google Panda is all about putting the highest quality sites first. Sites, not pages, in my opinion. Being rated as a whole and not as a part, is simply huge and I think overlooked by most people.

Pre Panda there was a mix of NFL teams and high school teams. In less niche or popular searches, the NFL teams are the "chosen ones". Afterall, if you want the best product then why would you show a high school team when you can show an NFL team? In areas that don't really matter, sure that NFL team and high school team coexist. That still happens today so long as you're not important.

I hope I'm wrong and that this isn't the case and that this isn't what the future holds regarding Google organic traffic. To put it simplistically, I think a lot of websites were brought into the big leagues or the major leagues because of Google's quality rankings. Because you're not in the minor leagues people are finding out the hard way that they really don't have quality and depth that the NFL teams have.

[econman]

they would need to also include the specific domain extension for it to be applicable

Yes, if the brand is "Apple" but perhaps not if the brand name is sufficiently unique (Wikipedia; TripAdvisor; Verizon).

A mega site is the NFL team.

I think the distinction between "brand" and "mega site" might be important -- and easily missed, since these concepts tend to go hand in hand.

If sites like suite101 and eHow were the intended targets of Panda, Google needed to identify "name brand mega sites" and to carefully distinguish those sites from the other extremely large sites -- the ones that are mass produced by content farmers.

So, it seems plausible that they might try using some sort of calculations that compare the number of pages on a site and/or the volume of traffic to the site with the number of times the name of the site is mentioned on the web or the number of times users use the domain name (with TLD) as part of their search.

For instance, perhaps many people use Google to search for "Dallas hotels TripAdvisor.com" in comparison to the analogous, smaller number who use Google to search for "how to choose the best Dallas hotel eHow.com" or whatever the closest analogous search might be.

The point being that there might be a huge discrepancy in search volumes including the domain name when compared to other relevant data, like the number of pages of content residing on the respective sites, or their total traffic volume. If the relative magnitudes were used (focusing on some sort of ratio, rather than absolute numbers), they might be able to push TripAdvisor and Wikipedia up while simultaneously pushing eHow and suite101 down.

Perhaps this might help explain why some branded sites are doing better post-Panda while others are not -- the important consideration isn't simply whether it is a branded site, but specific data and calculations that are correlated with brand names, but not perfectly correlated.

Panda is all about putting the highest quality sites first. Sites, not pages

I agree this is the goal, but that doesn't mean they are succeeding. In many niches the quality of the content on the name brand Mega Sites is limited in various ways -- it isn't really bad, but it may be too superficial or too biased, and thus not as useful as the content offered by a hobbyist's site, or by a smaller specialist site that no one has ever heard of.

I do think everyone needs to realize the rules of the game have changed -- you need to worry about quality and whether or not you can compete in that regard -- not merely whether you have better SEO, or whether you can crank out more pages than your competitors.

And, I don't think we should get too discouraged by the trend toward pushing name brand Mega Sites higher in the SERPs.

There is a limit to how far Google can go in this direction without undermining their entire raison d'etre. People need search engines to find sites they don't know about; they don't necessarily need them to find sites they are already familiar with.

[whatson]

Well if this is the case then EHow will be fine from all the publicity they are have been attracting online now due to Panda. I think it's a nice theory, but really doesn't really sound plausible.

I think SEO is still important, but you have to make sure you have achieved that quality level before you can worry about such other factors.