[This post starts on a relevant, lead-in tangent, but you can get straight to the point here]
When Google Webmaster Central Blog posted Showing More results from a Domain back on Friday 20th August I though t to myself… That’s funny – I’d read, only 2 days prior, a blog post titled Google treating brand names in search terms as site: searches?
I forget where I’d seen this discussed previously but there had been murmurings in the community regarding Google’s proposed treatment of brands and here were two blog posts that (sort of) confirmed that.
I checked some big brands and some clients’ less well-known brands and the quick squint of the SERPs seemed to confirm that changes were afoot.
Then one of my clients called me midweek to ask me about this was true –
“If you search for [query]”, they said, “what did I think about the fact that Google provides 7 results from the same domain for [query] and 3 for everything else?”
Well that seemed a perfectly good question, if slightly missing the point; Google themselves stated the new results tweak was for
“queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain“
and that they would
“now show more results from the relevant site“.
so I mentioned that it seemed to be about brand/domain/entity and mentioned the brands in Malcolm Coles’ post and a few others as examples of how the algorithm change seemed to be working and how there were some oddities.
Overall I’m not so sure about this algo change – As with all these SE tweeks there will be winners and losers. But that’s not what I came here to mention – I’m sure others will speculate further on the subject as we could here.
Whilst I was checking one of my clients’ brands I noticed a certain domain appear in the top 10 results that I’d not seen before:
uk.seoguardian.com/www/[brand].com
Seeing this on the supposed first week of the algo change and then again a week later was interesting. So I spent some time looking at http://uk.seoguardian.com/ for a number of other domains and was intrigued by the initial reporting/results.
I’m keen to sign up to SEOGuardian and have a good look at the toolset, it certainly looks very interesting, but I wondered if anyone else has had the chance to use it?
SEOGuardian seems to have sprung on to the SEO/SEM scene from nowhere so I wanted to know if any other SEO people have had the chance to try it out and what their opinions so far are? I’m interested to see how accurate the results might be and how often they’re updated.
Let me know your thoughts on http://uk.seoguardian.com/
Domain authority is more important than many people think.
I have websites (that are very strong in their niche but still rank second for its main keyword just because another brand is much more established in the niche.
That’s where I’m happy to let the brand have their top spot, Nima. OK, I see the fun and glory of getting placed above them. I beat Honda to the top slot for their “Hate something, change something” campaign many years ago until I switched the blog post from the subfolder of an established domain – at the time 5 years – to a brand spanking new domain and bombed in the SERPs – ah well, live and learn!
But what if you’ve worked hard to get that hallowed #2 or even #3 slot? I’d be happy with a top 5 for a competitive term but the chances of being “above the fold” in the SERPs are now reduced – All that hard work and you could drop from #3 to #8 because the brands now crowd out the results.
So this could well favour the big guys over the little guys… I shall watch this unfold with interest.
Thanks a lot for your mention about SEOGuardian. Just to complete info about what we intend to do, here are some highlights…
It is a new SEO and SEM analytics tool that will enable you to have access to very relevant data about more than 553.000 UK web sites.
SEOGuardian works specifically on the analysis of the UK market, tracking more than 60 industry segments. We track industries, domains and keywords on a monthly basis (for UK market, data start from may 2010 until today).
SEOGuardian also allows you also to create your very own “Guardian”, a specific report to track your keywords and your competitors regarding SEO and SEM results. Information is delivered via a private report seen only by you in your private user area.
Besides UK market, SEOGuardian is now operating in Italy, Spain, Brazil and Portugal. We are working on expanding SEOGuardian to more markets (countries).
Do not hesitate to sign up for a trial period. Feedbacks and suggestions for improvements will be highly appretiated.
(Congratulations for your blog, by the way…very interesting!)
Eduardo, thank you for the update. I’m really quite interested in SEOGuardian and will probably sign up for a trial – the style is clean and professional, the datasets on the public pages are really handy and I’m just wondering what the PRO version holds in store for SEOs…