1 reply to this topic

[sparkdigital]

I was talking to a colleague and he mentioned that the new Panda/Penguin tries to give priority to the website of the actual 'owner' of a brand or product, so for instance if I search for 'Beauty product A' this should bring up the website of the maker of the beauty product with more details about it rather than a website where I can buy this product.

 

Is this correct? If so, does Google penalise a website that has backlinks to its site with anchor text 'Beauty brand A' because Google might think this website is pretending to be the actual brand website?

 

Also, how does Google establish when something is the 'official' website? For instance, if I purchase a generic keyword rich domain, am I the official website becuase there is a match there?

Hope this makes sense and that you can see where I'm getting at!

 

Thanks,

 

Konrad

[qwerty]

It's not a Panda or Penguin thing, but Google does tend to show a preference for established brands. Some have argued that that is a choice Google made, but it may be that the algo just tends to find that a brand site is the most relevant to related queries.

 

I believe Google's recent tendency to downgrade "thin affiliate" sites that just use content copied from the manufacturer's information and as such lack unique content could be related to Panda. But that doesn't mean there's some anchor text penalty in place. If you sell Brand X paper clips and someone uses that phrase in a link to your site, you're not going to get into trouble just because you don't happen to be Brand X. What can get you in trouble (and this is part of Penguin) is if just about every link to your site is anchored by the exact phrase "Brand X paper clips".