It appears that lots of sites have been nuked from the face of the UK Serps because Google’s algorithm is now placing high emphasis on brand authority. Aaron Wall from SEO Book was a step ahead here, talking about this yonks ago. David Naylor has also recently mentioned that this appears to be a brand update.
Google UK SERPS Showing US Sites
I have personally witnessed some sites drop from the first page in Google UK for highly
competitive keywords and replaced with US sites. These were websites which had held their authoritative positions for several years. PPC Blog speculate this phenomena could be due to big geo problems. And webmaster world have a long thread with webmasters all having similar issues, but it appears we are still not seeing any return to normal. Have Google really messed up the UK serps, are they really broken, or are Google using UK as some kind of test bed for algorithm tweaking? One this is for sure, Google have definitely thrown a lot of poor unsuspecting webmasters completely off balance this time, and it’s all very likely due to this brand update.
Look carefully and you notice that it’s bigger brands from the USA which are slying their way in to the UK serps.
Garbage Was Slowing Google Down
If we try to think outside the box, major search engines have billions of sites to sift through, and there are thousands more new websites popping up every day. Now, Google knew this posed a problem, because traipsing through the gumph was beginning to be like running a marathon after eating a six egg omellet, and this ever-expanding cesspool of new sites WAS eating up more and more resources. If they didn’t take action, it would have choked their performance, forcing them to invest in more equipment to cope with another avalanche of a few million garbage websites.
Why Google Implemented the Brand Update
If each market of several million websites can be culled to a minority of a few hundred or thousand brands, the benefit is, it’s super savvy on resources, and Google can still provide quality, or even better search results to surfers than before, without any complaints. Alas, the business’s overtly reliant on organic search which have been destroyed have either of two choices – either build a brand, or spend out on Pay Per Click (Google want more sites delving in to PPC because it makes their business more profitable). I mean, this brand update really sucks for alot of webmasters, but you have to admire the ingenuity of Google as we have gained a small insight in to their strategy.
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