Recently, Aaron Wall had hinted about a new theory that Google favors “branding” and “brands” in its search results. (Details here) I think it was a great find by Aaron, but it was really hard to digest. Though the “theory” looked real, the proofs weren’t just enough to convince or make a point.
And today Matt Cutts have clearly washed out the doubts on this saying that its not true.
On the moderator forums, Monica Madison asked -
Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on “brands” in search engine rankings ? If the answer is “Yes” – what is Google’s definition of a brand ?
To which Matt replied that in the Google search ranking team, they don’t think about brands. They think about words like trust, authority, reputation, pagerank, high quality.
In the video Matt clearly makes the point that its the quality of your website and authority that Google sees in your niche (however small that is) as the factors that decide your Google ranks. In fact, that’s been the core message Google has been trying to convince the world with time and again.
I think that it makes sense, though its up to us (as always) to “guess” as to what authority and quality is. 
Check out the video.
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Hi, I'm Mani Karthik, Pro Blogger & SEO Consultant from India. I blog, I Tweet, help websites with SEO. Loves working from home office. Quit my day job as SEO consultant 4 years ago, to pursue full time blogging and consultation. Living the dream now.
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I think the reason it seems like Google places more emphasis on brands is that many strong brands also have lots of authority, followership & inbound links (which Google generally loves).
So it appears that they are favoring brands, when the fact is they are not favoring brands but instead favoring stronger domains with better overall industry reputations.
This is not to say that a mom-and-pop website can’t outrank a big corporate site, it is just less likely because bigger companies have a greater ability to support marketing, outreach, and all those things that make brands seem strong.
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Mani Karthik
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I agree.. Aaron made a good observation but the conclusions weren’t right. The authority theory holds true always.
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chris
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Its true corporate sites have that marketing strength to reach people through different ways.
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Very deep analysis and good thing that it’s all clear now to me. Thanks for this one.
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Yep I was the one disagreeing with him on his post.
It was only a matter of time before Google called it a myth
-Centuryhouse.net
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Look guys, let’s face the fact that strong brands come with loads of authority and trustworthiness that has been built up over the years. Google might not necessarily give more weight on the basis of a brand name, but the building process that has occurred over the years is what swings it in favour of the brand.
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i am disagree on this also. this is not true.
google wont be able to recognize the brand unless we tell them what should be the brand like.
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