If anyone wants the commentary to go with it, you should be able to hear it in the videos below, courtesy of Site Visibility.

As I said at the start of the presentation, I’m more than happy to field Panda related enquiries, bounce ideas, or just knowledge share on this topic, so feel free to get in touch either by email or Twitter.

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:

Tennis Courts To Hire

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

Clutter

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big advocate of both Google and Twitter, I just think that Google are going down a path that they shouldn’t be right now. In the old days, people preferred Google over other search engines because of its nice clean interface – the homepage looked pretty, with the search box and the two simple buttons. And the results were displayed in a nice clean way – just 10 results.

But recently, I’ve started to think that Google have lost their way a little. In the great battle to keep ahead of Bing, it seems like they’re rushing through products, with no clear focus on what they’re trying to achieve. The SERPs are changing more frequently than I think they have at any point in the past. I’d like to consider myself a Google power user – like most SEOs, I’ve got a good grip of how the SERPs work, and what different features do, but recently, even I’ve started finding it all a little bit confusing. Let’s look at a few examples of what I’m talking about:

Additional Indented Results / More Results From…

I really don’t like the additional indented result here.  And it’s kinda confusing having two different “More results from…” options.  Why does one have a plus box, and one not?

Obtrusive Blended Search

This isn’t the best example out there, but Google really seem to have turned up the dial on blended search results.  I’ve seen queries where the SERP contains 2 rows of images, followed by 2 rows of 2 videos, and I’m not even looking for videos or images.

Different Types of Indented Results

This set of results is kind of like the first set of results,  apart from these results have dates next to them.  Why is that?

Star Wars

This used to be one of my favourite blended search examples.  A good solid SERP, with a few pictures, maybe a few videos .  Now it’s bloody crazy!

So What’s This Got To Do With Twitter?

I think my point is, is that Google have come a long way since the simple SERP layout days, and have in the main done a good job of integrating vertical search products.  The problem is, is that it feels like they’ve taken it a step too far recently.  The SERPs are all looking a bit full-on, and I’m concerned about  what will happen  when they integrate Twitter conversations  into the main SERPs (if that’s the way they’re heading).  Twitter contains a lot of random noise, and when combined with an already noisy SERP, this could damage the one thing that Google has always been good at – delivering, clean relevant SERPs.

Image via @SparkyLeigh

Notice the two results I’ve highlighted – Norwich Union, and Aviva.  In case you’ve been asleep under a very large rock for while, you will know that Norwich Union rebranded as Aviva recently.

The Aviva website has been around for a while, but I believe they officially redirected www.norwichunion.com to www.aviva.co.uk last week, so finding it very strange that Google are choosing to return both domains for this very competitive keyword.  Still, good news for Norwich Union / Aviva eh?

Anyone know what’s going on here?

So Google have been busy beavering away lately.  First they rolled out “Vince’s Change” in the US (it’s yet to hit Europe apparently), then they rolled out the “Orion Update” that saw changes to SERPs last mid-last week, and then on Friday they started testing the Google Wonder Wheel.  And all this just as I was starting to feel there wasn’t much happening in the world of search at the moment.

While each of their changes are interesting in their own right (my personal favourite is the Wonder Wheel), it seems like the Orion Update is the one that’s caught everyone’s attention – I’ve had questions coming from numerous sources asking me how this will shape the future of the internet, as if it’s ground breaking new technology that will change the way we search.

The Orion Update is named after the Orion Search Engine, developed by Ori Allon, which was acquired by Google in 2006.  The search engine was able to return not just content optimised for a given keyword, but also content semantically related to that keyword.  This technology formed a major part of the update, that consisted of two parts:

1. Longer snippet text
2. Showing related search results for wider variety of queries

In terms of longer snippet text, I’m not a big fan of this.  Instead of showing two lines of snippet text to accompany each search result, it’s now choosing to show more if need be – I think I’ve seen up to 5 lines of text in some instances.  This is great for Google – it means they can answer a users query directly from the search results, but will clearly reduce click-throughs to the websites that contain that information.

The related search results for a wider variety of queries is where the “new” semantic technology comes into play.  And this is what really bugs me.  This really isn’t new.  This has been happening for years.  All they’ve done here is expanded the set of terms this is applicable to.  So instead of only seeing this when searching for generic terms (“car insurance“, “loans“), you’ll now see this for more niche queries (“physics particle neutron“).  Sure it’s a great addition to the SERP, and it’ll help users refine queries.  But I don’t think at the moment it’ll radically change search behaviour.

It would be different, however, if they were to incorporate this technology within their core search algorithm.  If, for example, they monitor CTR on these related searches links, it may be possible to pull these related search results through to the initial search result.  For example, currently when you do a search for “helium”, “helium gas” is highlighted as a related search.  If Google know that 90% (or some other equally high percentage) of users are unsatisfied with the first page of result, and subsequently click on the “helium gas” result, then it would make sense to pull some of the “helium gas” results through to the “helium” SERP.

This raises a couple of important issues.  Firstly, what does this mean for 2nd page of Google results.  If searchers are always presented with viable alternatives by Google, then there’s less need to click through to the 2nd page of results.  This would make first page visibility much more important.  Secondly, this would change the strategy that many adopt in terms of optimising onpage content.  If it’s not possible to hit the first page for a query – perhaps it’s too competitive – then maybe the way forward is to look for other less competitive, but semantically related keywords, that could still get your website listed under the more competitive keyword.  Will be interesting to see how this pans out.