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A Comprehensive Guide to the Vince Update

Call it what you will.  The Vince Update?  The Big Brand Update?  Something big happened to Google’s algorithm this year.  It hit the US in February and the UK in June, and it’s flummoxed the greatest minds in SEO ever since.  Everyone’s tweeted about it, blogged about it, passed opinion on it at various conferences, but every week I see someone blog about Vince who seems to have got the wrong end of the stick.  How exactly Google are giving preference to “brands”?  In this post I’m going to give a potted history of the best commentary published post Vince, and how each bit of analysis fits together to produce a wider picture of what’s happening with the brand update.

In The Beginning
One man, and one man only broke the news – Aaron Wall of SEOBook.  His epic post helped to explain the significance of this update, and how it sits as one of the major updates alongside Florida, Austin, the introduction of the nofollow etc… Aaron provides excellent examples of where he first saw Vince take effect, and later we’ll visit another of his blog posts that pulls the final pieces of the jigsaw together. Subsequently there was also a huge amount of discussion over at Sphinn after Danny Sullivan started a comment thread discussing the update.

Read Aaron’s full post:
New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding

Confirmation
Shortly after Aaron’s post, SearchEngineLand blogged confirmation from Google that something had changed.  In a video, Matt Cutts says that this is not an “update”, more a “change in how we do some rankings”.

Read the post at SearchEngineLand:
Google Calls It A Trust Change

Vince Hits The UK
From a UK SEO’s perspective, I guess it all went fairly quiet after that.  I don’t recollect seeing much analysis coming out of the US in terms of what may be causing this, and I guess over this side of the pond we weren’t really that interested in it as it didn’t affect any of the websites we worked on.  That all changed on June 25^th when Vince was rolled out to www.google.co.uk.  All of a sudden we had to get involved.

The Analysis
Richard Baxter of SEO Gadget was the first person that I remember providing any detailed analysis.  Using SEOMoz’s Linkscape, he demonstrated that there was still a strong correlation between links and visibility within Google.  I think all SEOs collectively let out a huge sigh of relief when they read that – at least we could still have some influence over the websites we worked on

Read Richard Baxter’s full post
Google’s Vince Update – Brand or no Brand?

Citations
Lots of people suddenly started to talk a lot more about citations.  I mean, it made complete sense.  How could you tell a brand?  You’d not just look at the most linked to websites, but the most talked about.  I think this distracted the industry for quite a while, and lead most of us on a bit of a wild goose chase.  In retrospect, I think citations would be incredibly noisy, and probably easier to game than links, unless quality factors such as age and authority of citation were taken into account.  At the time, I thought it was a very plausible theory.  I think Patrick Altoft’s writeup, which summarises a lot of Tedster’s posts from Webmasterworld, is a good place to read up about citations, or “mentions”, as they’re called in his post.

Read Patrick Altoft’s full post
How User Data, Links, and Document Scoring May Be Used in the Brand Algorithm?

UK SERPs
After Vince launched, many UK SEOs started to notice that geolocation in UK SERPs was a litte bit messed up.  “tennis courts to hire” is a prime example of where this was happening:

In the UK, we really shouldn’t be seeing those Australian websites ranking!  Rishil, Sharkseo and others led the charge with this on Twitter, with Matt Cutts eventually releasing a video response to the question that he had previously tried to dodge:

Now you may be wondering what geolocation has got to do with Vince, but whenever there’s an algorithm update of any kind, it’s always the anomalies within the SERPs that you uncover patterns, and therefore help SEOs to work out what’s going on in the algorithm.

Cracking the Algorithm
It was iCrossing UK who first posted the most conclusive evidence as to what may be happening with Vince.  The idea that query refinements, and CTRs on secondary SERPs, could be helping to define results was as good (actually it was a lot better) as any previous guess as to what was happening with Vince.   In fact, the more I looked into it, the more it seemed to fit with every strange SERP that I’d previously been unable to explain.

A personal bug bear of mine had been the fact that the website for MFI (a UK furniture store) was ranking on the first page for “furniture”, even though the company had gone into administration 9 months previously, and the website had been replaced by a holding page announcing the company’s financial situation.  The connection between query refinements and Google’s related search was the part that really made the whole theory work, and this simple connection seemed to be the bit that almost all SEOs seemed to miss, despite the fact that it was sitting right under our noses the whole time.

Read iCrossing’s full post:
Unlocking Google’s Vince Update

All the Pieces of the Jigsaw
Following the iCrossing piece, there were quite a few additional bits of research that helped to fill in all the missing pieces of the jigsaw.  Sharkseo suggested that global query refinements were a heavy factor within Vince, which accounted for the screwed up geolocation within UK SERPs.  Dave Naylor produced some interesting analysis too, suggesting the same thing. Despite this information being out on the table, plenty of SEOs seemed to miss it – in particular, Patrick Altoft, who following A4U, summarised some of Matthew Trewhella’s (a Google UK engineer) comments and suggested that “the brand update is about Google minimising the number of times people have to search to find the products or information they are looking for”.   What Matthew was suggesting was pretty much identical to the theories put forward in the iCrossing post, which in many ways was quite handy as it was independent verification that what many people were thinking about at the time was correct.  This is where it’s also worth pulling in the aforementioned second blog post by Aaron Wall that pulls lots of these ideas together, but also points people in the direction of the handy Adlabs Search Funnel tool, for analysing query refinements.

Read SharkSEOs full post:
Is this Google UK’s Glitch

Read Dave Naylor’s full post:
This Doesn’t Make Sense UK SERPs

Read Patrick Altoft’s full post:
The Brand Update is about Maximising Satisfaction Rates

Read Aaron Wall’s full post:
Brand’s vs Query Refinements – Google Using Second Search

The Aftermath
I guess the reason why I wanted to write this blog post was because of the recent eConsultancy three-parter on Vince. I waited eagerly to hear their views on what was causing it, only to see that someone had come to the conclusion that it was a hand-edit of results (based somewhat on the fact that Matt Cutts had asserted that this wasn’t an update).  While their analysis was very good, their conclusion, in my opinion, was wrong, and this made me realise that there are probably a whole bunch of SEOs who have missed the voluminous amounts of research and analysis that has gone before them on the subject.  Hopefully I’ve captured most of the standout stuff here – I’m sure there’s stuff I’ve missed too, so if there’s anything you think should be included, feel free to drop me a comment below and I’ll be more than happy to add it.

Read eConsultancy’s Three Parter:
Vince Unravelled – Part 1
Vince Unravelled – Part 2
Vince Unravelled – Part 3

Image via @Caveman_9223

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Tags: brand update, google, query refinements, related searches, vince, vince update