Google’s Vince Update Produces Big Brand Rankings; Google Calls It A Trust “Change”

arthurofsun, March 5th, 2009 at 1:08 pm ET:
Premium member since 01/2009

The more I hear about the Vince change the less I like it. Google wants to believe that Big Brands are more “trustworthy” – which is the filter through which they see the world. But the fact is, a Big Brand is worth billions, and Big Brands have the $$ and spend hugely to defend their brand.

What happens when there is bad word-of-mouth about a brand? Big Brand goes into triage mode and has their SEO and reputation management teams attack the problem and work to push the comments down the search rankings so they don’t appear on the first SERP. if you bias toward Big Brands, that will only allow the Big Brand to skew the result further and avoid a NPOV (to use Wikipedia’s term) from being shown to the wider community.

This is one scenario. There are more.

Point: Big Brands are no more “trustworthy” than you, me, or a small brand. In fact, because of their economic self-interest, they may be even less so.

My request: Google Undo This Change.

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sean, March 6th, 2009 at 3:11 am ET:

At least one thing seems true here. In the past, some may have felt that Google gave/gives special consideration to non-commercial (.gov, .edu..) sites in part to incent big brands to spend on AdWords.

If big brands now have greater visibility in organic results, their incentive to spend on AdWords will be more motivated by a desire to occupy more real estate rather than from a absolute lack of visibility.

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parneetgosal, March 13th, 2009 at 2:47 pm ET:

How is Google measuring “trust” and “authority” and how objective is this index?

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MyBestRatedWebHosting, March 19th, 2009 at 8:07 am ET:

I think the “Vince” update does not make sense if they are trying to push a brand in major keywords just because of only branding. For example, if the web hosting company appear when peoples do search for “web hosting” so it does make sense. How about if peoples do search for other peoples opinion like “web hosting reviews” or “best web hosting” and similar? If the brand still got ranked for those kind of search term then it does not make any sense. People who search for other ones opinion absolute not interest to see a hosting company appeared for the terms. Every company has to claim themselves they are the best with bias toward. In this case, Google does not deliver the result that people really looking for.

Branding can have advantage but it should make some sense too.

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