How Important is Branding to Search Engine Marketing?

Aaron Wall
October 09th, 2008.

pDo you have a brand? If not, your site is part of a cesspool. In a href=http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=131569AdAge/a Google's CEO Eric Schmidt explains the AdWords quality score and organic ranking algorithms in laymans terms:/p blockquotepstrongThe internet is fast becoming a cesspool where false information thrives/strong, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted. /p pBrands are the solution, not the problem, Mr. Schmidt said. strongBrands are how you sort out the cesspool./strong/p p Brand affinity is clearly hard wired, he said. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component. /p/blockquote pThe key to understanding the above is to appreciate that not only do the large brands have more money and more exposure, but they are emless likely to be policed/em if they do the same thing that a smaller webmaster does. It is why a billion dollar company's affiliate program passes PageRank and my affiliate links do not. /p pSimply put, a href=http://www.3dogmedia.com/why-big-brands-should-spam-search-engines/big brands should spam/a. Smart people like you, who read the algorithms as a profession, already knew this, but a large segment of publishers think search is mostly trickery and voodoo. /p pBuild a brand and buy links. If your brand is big enough you most likely will not get policed out of the search results. a href=http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/the-paid-link-farce-is-3-years-old-get-your-act-together-google/It has been that way for years/a. If only the AdWords support team or Matt Cutts spoke with Mr. Schmidt's level of clarity!/p