Why do big brands rank so well?



Filipe Santos from New York, NY asks:

“As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well irregardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine results pages?”

Recorded on April 23, 2009.

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22 thoughts on “Why do big brands rank so well?”

  1. I mean it's rlly not a comp out answer. If the best product is from amazon, you get an amazon result. If its from xyz site, you get xyz site.

    The difference is xyz site has 100 products and amazon has 200 million. I mean use math and think about it.

  2. @MattCutts Matt, you seem like a good guy, and I admit to the odd scathing reply to some of your info provided, I hope you don't take it personally, but i have to call you on this one.

    I've analysed site traffic, and rankings for certain keywords, and I have discovered to my surprise, that my rankings have gone quite a bit up since 2006. Thing is, my site has been dead for years.

    And that's the point. Practically all the Mom and Pops are dead. Over-reliance of PR killed them.

  3. haha I'm stomping STOMPING all the competition. And, I'm just one guy, with a very crappy website [ doing redesign now] And they, I know for a fact, have teams of people doing SEO for them. When I outranked my greatest competition, I was a happy puppy.

    Now sites like wikipedia, has crazy traffic, that's why they rank well. But you can take them down, with effort and skill. They are not always number 1, in fact I've seen them at 7 in some pages.

  4. Without sounding like Im complaining… I have to totally disagree. I am online with my shop now for over a year, have very good content, have natural backlinks and am specialized in one product group but even after 1 year, Im not able to get past page 10 with a certain key with countless irrelevant pages before me with no relevance to this particular key… needless to say not even close to the big names!

  5. Matt I am a big fan of the videos you have produced, and I believe it is awesome Google is open about questions, but I must disagree with the answer on this one as well. Small Businesses stood a chance before big businesses optimized websites and so on. Now it is an uphill battle to get make it some where as a small business owner on the internet.

  6. Big brands have 2 huge advantages: 1) using their already known brand name to leverage more links on all corners of the web, and 2) the capital to spend 5-6 figures on hiring companies for a backlink campaign, which is why they appear for high visibility keywords. It's unfortunate to see how backlinks are still such a major factor in ranking.

  7. The biggest reason that in most cases Big Brands are showing up in the higher rankings is that they tend to send out press releases at a rate of +/- 4 a month. The press get these and post them with links to the brand name sites. No matter how hard mom and pop stores work, they will not have this power of incoming links that brand name sites do.

  8. I have to say that I don't agree matt. Yes, rarely a more relevant page shows up instead of a brand but in my experience they have much more leverage regardless of the actual value from the page result.

  9. Of late, Many of the brands with good reputation with the search engines have added social bookmarking to their site; safe bet for spammers and MFA sites to stuff junk on the SERPs.

    unfortunately, these big brands are doing nothing about it, maybe they added the bookmarking feature to exploit the algorithms in the first place and they are very much succeeding in it.

  10. Seriously, I look forward to your videos Matt but this was pure drivel. You remind me of the newspapers saying we have letters saying that we are too conservative or too liberal so we must be in the right place. The kooks will write no matter what.

    This one should have stayed in the can…

  11. Matt, estaba esperando que dieras algún tip, o que comentaras alguna buena estrategia, no que dijeras "pobre de nosotros, todo el mundo nos maltrata…"

    Matt, I expected some kind of tip or comment about any stragegy, not the "poor little google, everybody is rude with us…"

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