Google Loves Brands

If those companies believed this then at a minimum I would expect them to run AdWords ads for those keywords. I just searched for "cranberries" and saw no ads from them. I also searched for Bing & they are not advertising there either (so it is not just a case of Google suggesting the quality score is too low to show ads).
The only Ocean Spray listing I saw was an article from MSNBC that was anything but flattering: "Ocean Spray Craisins recalled because of metal fragments."
Suffice it to say, if Ocean Spray agrees with you, then their CMO should be fired yesterday.

Aaron, as the author of SEOBook, you should understand that a site that uses Home | Oceanspray for its title tag hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about SEO. And if they have an SEO or search marketing firm, they probably should be fired, because they didn’t help the client succeed. If they don’t have an SEO team or agency it wouldn’t surprise me, as CPG companies are rooted in traditional marketing and typically slow to adapt new ways of thinking. This is largely why Google released their winning the Zero Moment of Truth manifesto earlier in the year, pointing out to CMOs the real opportunity in digital, and specifically search and mobile.

However, just because Ocean Spray doesn’t have their stuff together doesn’t mean that other companies in the CPG space are lost as well. We have a client in the beverage market for paid search who bids on [sports drink], not because people are going to buy sports drinks online, but because they’re using search as a branding channel, and want to be top of mind when a searcher raises their hand and says they’re interested in something that the brand is highly relevant for. Enquiro/Mediative put out research a few years ago with Google that demonstrates how search is a great channel for branding, and savvy brand managers have since shifted funds from traditional marketing to a channel where they can more easily track the results. And judging from the other brands buying relevant keywords for everything from sports drink (Gatorade, Red Bull, FRS, Hammer, Powerade, Coke) to hair gel (Tresseme, Herbal Essences, Garnier) to toothbrush (Oral B) to recipes (Kraft), it seems we’re not the only marketers who are having success with this.

As for Black Friday, the volume for those few days is 1/4 of what insurance is for the entire year in the US so I think you're underestimating the potential. You're also still thinking about the direct revenue that the listing would bring to affiliates, and not about the potential sales offline that it could bring to a retailer like Walmart or Target. There's a reason that retailers spend so much preparing for Black Friday, and it's not $50,000. :)
A 2% affiliate commission is not the same thing as total retail sales. That said, it is easy to highlight the retail sales volume to overstate the potential as well...I mean some of those retail companies have 1% to 3% margins. A billion Dollars in revenues sounds like a lot of money. But at a 1% margin that is only $10 million. The reason insurance is a great comparison against retail is that if you add up TOTAL year-round retail sales...that entire market in the US is only about 1/3rd the size of the finance, insurance & real estate (FIRE) market.

I’m actually saying that a two percent affiliate commission is not the same as total retail sales, so I’m not sure why you’re repeating me.

As for insurance keywords specifically, why are you blaming Google when the large brands themselves in that space are likely spending millions on SEO? It's not uncommon for large companies to hire someone like us even when they have large in-house SEO teams, which GEICO likely does according to this profile of their SEO Manager to 2010, and Allstate does, as I believe they use Digitas and I've been approached by their teams at conferences before, and here's esurance's SEO team on Linkedin : .... It's not so much that Google loves big brands as that big brands are finally seeing the opportunity in search and doing SEO.
Not to fault any of the people you singled out (which I did not single out), but more generally...in terms of corporate brand SEO stuff, if the love was from their skill rather than algorithmic skew then there wouldn't be updates like Vince & Matt Cutts wouldn't have suggested that we put sites like x over here and sites like y over there during the Panda update. And there wouldn't have been messages in Politically Illustrated about a backdoor deal between Google & the OPA.

Politically Illustrated? This is a reliable source?

As for insurance SEOs, I didn’t present anything that wasn’t public information. If these SEOs don’t want people to know who they work for they shouldn’t put it on Linkedin.

And as Matt Cutts explains later in this response, Panda and the Vince change weren’t about brands, but about trust, authority, reputation, quality, etc. Affiliates and brands can be affected by low quality content, not just small businesses or affiliates.

Oddly, though, for the query [insurance] in Google I'm seeing personalized, localized results in Chicago, which along with large nationwide insurance companies bring me small brands I've never heard of like "AMA Insurance", "Norvax Inc", "Go Health Insurance," etc. In spite of having an entire SEO team in-house working for natural visibility, esurance is barely on the first page for me. This doesn't work well for your theory.
Google ramped up on local because it often allows them to eat the second click. After they did that they also ramped up on brand further. Talk to the thousands of small ecommerce businesses that were torched and ask them if the local bias helps offset the brand bias...for them each of those algorithmic adjustments was just another kick in the nuts.

It does help small businesses with unrecognizable brands, though, and doesn’t fit neatly into your theory.

What are the terms though, that you would like to test for this, and what is your definition of brand, exactly? Is SimplyRecipes.com a brand, or an affiliate, or both? If we can come up with a methodology that you think would yield compelling results, we should actually study this and determine if the brand bias exists.
For starters, how about the terms I already highlighted during the Vince update?

Okay, but why did you choose these particular terms? And why only 7? If we want to make it scientific we need to define our methodology and follow the scientific method, which it doesn’t appear that you’ve done here. If you’d like to do that I’m more than happy to comply, but I need you to work with me, not argue with me.

Nice neat buckets are wonderful to use when trying to debunk something, but the reality is some concepts in marketing are a bit fuzzy and some websites can serve multiple rolls [sic]. Barnes & Nobles [sic] has affiliate rug sales offers on their site while being a brand. Amazon.com has recently dialed up on displaying ads for 3rd party websites, while still being a brand. Google's search results have added many affiliate links to them, while Google is still a brand.

You put these concepts in neat buckets. It is incumbent upon you to define why you did so. I’m the one arguing that websites can serve multiple roles, and you’re the one saying that Google favors brands without addressing affiliates that are attempting to become brands, like FatWallet, SimplyRecipes, AllRecipes, etc. If we’re going to test this we will need to define what we mean by brand for the purpose of labeling, which you don’t seem interested in doing.

As it is, an infographic, while visually stimulating, doesn't tell us much.
So if Google puts AT THE TOP OF THE ORGANIC SEARCH RESULTS listings where it says "brands: _brand_a_ _brand_b_ _brand_c_ that doesn't tell us much? Seriously?

Yes, seriously. You know as well as I do that this is based on search behavior. People search for brands as they do for stores and as they do for types. Google sees what you and I would see if we put ambiguous queries in the keyword tool, which is the ambiguous term paired with brands, stores and types. Take appliances for example, which is an ambiguous query where these related searches come up. If we look at the top related queries for appliances, this is what we see:

number Top searches for appliances index category
1 sears 100 store
2 sears appliances 100 store
3 ge appliances 70 brand
4 ge 70 brand
5 home appliances 45 type
6 kitchen appliances 40 type
7 lowes 40 store
8 lowes appliances 40 store
9 home depot appliances 25 store
10 used appliances 25 type
11 lg 25 brand
12 lg appliances 25 brand
13 viking appliances 20 brand
14 viking 20 brand
15 whirlpool 20 brand
16 whirlpool appliances 20 brand
17 bosch 20 brand
18 bosch appliances 20 brand
19 refrigerator 15 type
20 best buy appliances 15 store
21 kenmore 15 brand
22 kenmore appliances 15 brand
23 maytag appliances 10 brand
24 maytag 10 brand
25 discount appliances 10 type
26 refrigerators 10 type
27 wolf appliances 10 brand
28 kitchenaid 10 brand
29 kitchenaid appliances 10 brand
30 general electric appliances 10 brand
31 general electric 10 brand
32 stainless steel appliances 10 type
33 frigidaire appliances 10 brand
34 frigidaire 10 brand
35 small appliances 10 type
36 electrolux appliances 5 brand
37 electrolux 5 brand
38 cash for appliances 5
39 consumer reports appliances 5
40 samsung appliances 5 brand
41 cheap appliances 5 type
42 kitchen aid 5 brand
43 kitchen aid appliances 5 brand
44 sears outlet 5 store
45 ge profile appliances 5 brand
46 american appliances 5 store
47 appliances online 5
48 sears.com 5 store
49 sears.com appliances 5 store
50 amana appliances 5 brand

When we do quick math we see that 94% of the queries and almost 99% of the index can easily be classified according to searches for brands, stores or types. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that Google, whose success in organic search depends on its ability to quickly satisfy a user’s intent, puts these refinements here for ambiguous queries because they love brands so much? Do they also love stores and types? Seriously? If you really believe that Google did this for nefarious reasons and not because it improves their search engine, you don’t know much about how Google works, and you should take off your tinfoil hat for a few minutes to figure it out.

Also, just because you put something in all caps does not make it profound. Just looks like you’re shouting, which is not a way to win an argument.

And their CEO suggesting that “brands are how you sort out the cesspool” is also irrelevant?

He’s not their CEO any more. You know as well as I do that a lot has changed at Google since Larry Page took over in April. Something that their former CEO said more than three years ago honestly isn’t that relevant in an industry that moves as fast as ours does. That being said, you took his quote out of context. What he was saying is that people want and trust brands, and he was saying it in order to get magazine publishing executives to consider digital in addition to traditional marketing. Google sees that users are searching for brands, so it probably seems to them that, as Schmidt said in that same article, "“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."" Google’s job, again, is to remain relevant in the marketplace by providing searchers information they need quickly, or searchers are going to get that information elsewhere (Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Siri or other competitors who might provide more relevant results). If searchers are looking for brands and Google doesn’t have content from those brands to show, they can’t do their job effectively. You’re also implying that Google will show brands ahead of affiliates or other sites that might be relevant to the query, but that’s ridiculous when you consider what Eric Schmidt said in the same article you took this quote from:
""We don't actually want [the audience of publishers who are also brands] to be successful," he said. The company's algorithms are trying to find the most relevant search results, after all, not the sites that best game the system. "The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance," he added. "

If you read this article in context it’s crystal clear that he’s saying Google’s organic search results are impartial to brands and strive to provide relevant information be it from brands or stores or types or affiliates or whatever. The fact that you left this out of your analysis suggests to me that you’re either not a very critical reader or you have an agenda to push and you’re omitting information that doesn’t fit that agenda. Either way it needs to be said in order to make sense of what Eric Schmidt said to those magazine publishers almost three years ago.

But yes, if you have something that’s more recent that makes sense in context, I can see how that would be relevant. And if it came from Larry Page, the current CEO, it would be compelling because of his position in the company, in which he sets the direction for where Google will be strategically in the market. Google also has a search ranking team, however, and webmaster evangelists, and as I showed recently in Search Engine Land, Google can contradict themselves in the press about issues that are important to us. If you get Amit Singhal, Ben Gomes, Johanna Wright, Jonathan Effrat, Othar Hansson, Scott Huffman and most of their board of directors and executives to say that brands are more important than affiliates for search quality, then I would stop talking and cede you the floor. You won’t be able to do that, however, because you couldn’t even get two quotes without pulling them out of context.

Not just with Eric Schmidt, but the quote you provided from Matt Cutts isn’t even about brands. It’s about trust, authority, quality and reputation. If you want to get a direct quote from Matt Cutts on brands, you should use the one that he gave you when he responded to your theory back during the Vince change, which I posted already in comments on my blog: “But you know inside of Google, at least within the search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands. We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, high quality. And so the Google philosophy on search results has been the same pretty much forever. It’s that if somebody comes to Google and types an X, we want to return high quality information about X. And sometimes that’s a brand search, sometimes that’s an informational search, sometimes it’s transactional, so there are all sorts of different information needs that people have.” Honestly I’m surprised you’re still talking about this after Matt Cutts put it that way. You either use an argument from authority or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways, and you can’t just ignore evidence that doesn’t conform to your theories. At least not if you’re talking to a reasonable audience.

I am not sure if you are just posturing to appeal to current & potential clients, but if you are not I am not sure what more one can say to confirm something beyond grabbing confirming quotes from BOTH the CEO and leading engineers.

If you want quotes, I just gave you two quotes from the same people you cited that disprove your theory. And no, you still haven’t gotten me a quote from the current CEO.

This isn’t about posturing; it’s about cutting through the nonsense and getting to the truth of the matter. It’s amazing to me sometimes that people take what you say and parrot the sound bites like they’re gospel truth when you sometimes post stuff like this that seems to be agenda-driven, as it omits quite a bit of contradictory evidence in favor of whatever theory you have. I think a lot of people are intimidated by you, and some people just have better things to do than point out your errors, but we’re never going to move forward as an industry if we’re stuck on debating theories that are based on information that’s taken out of context while ignoring contradictory information. I know you’re wrong in this case and I’m not afraid to stand up and show you why. You can do whatever you want with that information, but hopefully some people will read what you’ve written and read what I’ve written and think twice about what you said. Because, honestly, it doesn’t make sense. If you can still subscribe to this theory after everything I have shown you, then I don’t know what to tell you. But hopefully some reasonable people out there will see the light, and maybe think more critically the next time they read something from an SEO guru, instead of taking it on authority that it’s the truth. I’m responsible for the success and training of a team of 20+ SEOs, and when they see stuff like this that seems suspect, I want them to call it out. I am therefore walking the walk.

I also love this quote from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Others have pointed out my brand bias in the comments of my blog, but as I pointed out there, they’re unfounded. I work with large brands, small brands, all types of brands, and I have white hat affiliate sites that I use for testing purposes. In all cases I’ve been able to find great success in Google’s natural search results regardless of the type of client, and I’d be doing fine if the pendulum of brands and affiliates actually defied all of the evidence I’ve presented to you and swung one way or the other.

Plus, I majored in English in undergrad, and Upton Sinclair’s not that good of a writer.

You, though… your clients are mostly affiliates, no? Might Sinclair’s quote just as easily apply to you? What would you do if Google said they didn’t have a brand bias (as they did), and the organic results were in fact the way they are not to get brands more traffic, but to provide the most relevant result for the most relevant query? Wouldn’t that mean you’ve been wasting your time and your readers’ time talking about it for over years? That can’t be good for business, can it?

Look, I think most people are going to believe you here because of your reputation, and because they aren’t good enough SEOs to know any better; but it’s a shame, as what you’re saying isn’t based in reality. I think more people in the industry need to question the status quo when it doesn’t seem right, even if it’s coming from someone who has a reputation for providing quality information. Though I’ve never been afraid to do that, I’m now high up enough in the organization I’m a part of that I’m less involved in client projects directly, and have more time to contribute to the industry by calling out nonsense like this when I see it.

I don’t have that much time, though, especially when it seems from your comments that I may be talking to a wall (pun intended). I have paying clients, a wife and two infant children that deserve my time a little more than you do, but I wanted to respond fully to your comments. If you’d care to address the issues I’ve presented and explain how your theory works even with the conflicting evidence that you’ve omitted, I’m sure we’d all love to hear it. If not, best of luck to you in your endeavors.

I’m also pitching this topic to SMX West, so if you’d prefer to discuss it in that, slightly more impartial to you forum, I’d be happy to include you on the pitch.

Best,
Bryson