WP Minute Producer and SEO correspondent, John Locke of Lockdown Design discusses Google Search and what is important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). John is a member of the WPMinute community and participates regularly in WordPress and SEO. He has helped customers with their website workflow, boost their sales, and rank higher in Google. John’s channel on YouTube has so much information on SEO, Marketing and Web Design. It is worth checking out.

In 2008 Google first published its blueprint for SEO success and it was that brands were the solution. In order to retain market share for the future, Google needed to have trusted brands on their side forever. John covers the “unspoken” part about brands in this episode. To maximize the content on your website for SEO you need to think about scalable ways in which Google measures your brand characteristics.

One of Google’s important measurements appears to be that large brands will sometimes rank with secondary content. How does duplicate content appear under that brand and not yours? Well, Google ranks duplicate content with the most authoritative site (big brand).

Google looks for characteristics of big brands. Large brands work across several channels and social profiles. They often have the budget for a site that is designed for optimization. They have the staff to do that work and often post on job boards when they need additional staff. When customers find these larger brands on social sites it triggers that they are happy.

So what do you do as a small brand to improve your rankings? You need to act like a big brand. Work across social channels so that you become recognized as a prominent brand. In order for you to rank in the 2020s, you need the right content for your target keywords and keep appearing as large as a brand as possible so that the signals are picked up by Google search. Work with an expert to review your site design to help move you up in the rankings. 

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Episode transcript

Back in 2008 in one simple statement, Google gave out the blueprint for SEO success and revealed what their long-term goals were for the ranking. On that note worthy day, then CEO, Eric Schmidt stood in front of a room of media advertisers and said, brands are the solution. Not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.

Schmidt was referring to the dilemma of algorithmically sorting through trillions of webpages and delivering the best search results. So Google could retain market share through the foreseeable future. His analogy was having prestigious and trusted brands on one side and everyone else. On the other side, he went on to say that brands are an important signal that a website's content could be trusted.

Every tweak to the algorithm since then has had this mission statement in mind to maximize the SEO of content on your website. You should think about scalable ways in which Google might measure the characteristics of a brand. Let's look at one example of how Google favors large brands in the present day in a 2021, Google hangout, Google representative, John Mueller was.

How Google determines the original author of a piece of content in a question regarding duplicate content Mueller's answer is that Google will sometimes rank a piece of copied content from a secondary source, not the original source material. He said that sometimes it makes sense to show meaning rank that content instead of the original, because.

Does not only measure quality by the text on the page. He also said that Google looks at design and presentation of information as factors. One unspoken part of this is that in reality, when other factors are equal, Google usually ranks duplicate cont