BRAND SIGNALS!!
They’re everywhere!
It appears that the SEO world in 2013 is about creating a brand (fake it til you make it), standing out within your industry (creating original, interesting, link worthy content) and user metrics (CTR, time on site, returning visitors. You know, all that good stuff)
Oh yeah, maybe also a bit of social goodness as well.
Today we are going to discuss BRANDS and what makes them so brandy. All of our clients want to be large brands and lets face it the majority of them will never be but how could we look to make them look a little shinier in the eye of our friendly, local Googlebot?
I was sat in bed thinking “If one was interested how could one fake the backlink profile to make them look more brandy?”
and then it hit me. “Who are the biggest brands?” so I looked it up.
Cool, no real surprises there. “I wonder who links to them? More importantly who links to all of them?”
So I looked…
Yes there are .com’s/.co.uk’s but I have stuck with the .com’s just for this example. You can use either the fresh index or historical index but for this example I’ve used the fresh index.
Interestingly (or not) there are only 62 websites online linking to all 10 of these brands. I know that Majestic don’t index the whole of the internet but this still surprises me. Lets have a look at a few of them below.
How about some more?
I like this idea as it allows you to create/gain links from certain websites that either:
- Will pass on ‘You’re a trusted brand, we like you!’ metrics
- Are unlikely to result in your website getting any sort of penalisation. Unless Google decides to dilute links if they aren’t pointing at large brands. I think it’s safe to say that this is fantasy, for the moment at least.
Exported your own report and got links from the 1,000 sites? You’re on the way to faking a brand, excellent!
Now try it out on the brands from 11-20 🙂
Further reading:
- http://www.seobook.com/brand-and-the-cycle
- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-next-generation-of-ranking-signals
- http://kaiserthesage.com/brand-signals/
- http://www.seobook.com/potential-brand-signals
Interesting that so few sites link to all those big brands… that does surprise me a little.
I guess this link building lark is a bit easy then just get a bunch of links from sites with an Alexa rank <150 😉
Yeah I thought so too. Haha, of course, I never said it was easy! There are a few ‘easy’ wins on there though 🙂
interesting angle. one could even tell college interns kept in the agency basement to spend a few hours per day targeting that list.
cater toward the 1%ers. one could put on a t shirt and hit up the local watering hole. but fuck it- take a shower, shine shoes, and buy girls with fake boobies drinks uptown.
I think one occasionally does.
Uptown is where the link juice and brand recognition lives!
Love the thought process behind this, awesome job
Cheers Justin, hopefully it will help in some way.
Clever work! I’d imagine that non-linking citations from major media sites are a big part of the “brand signal” as well but reverse engineering them would be a bit tougher.
Cheers Michael, thanks for reading. In terms of checking for non linking citations you could search for intext:brand although I suppose this probably won’t cut out links.