The query is the brand

People are talking about brand value so much these days I sometimes wonder if we should call it a new buzzword (but since “brand” and “brand value” have been around for ages, that wouldn’t make sense).

The search engine optimization community almost suffered a collective heart attack over the so-called Brand Update until Matt Cutts deflated all the speculative explanations with the off-handed comment about Google modifying its trust algorithms for some queries.

Around the same time that people began obsessing about brands in search results Nicholas Ramirez (here at SEO Theory Central) published an article on Best SEO Blog about how to choose a domain you can search optimize.

The article offers some good advice but it does draw into question how important a domain name really is. I know many a Webmaster and starting SEO has asked about the value of keywords in domain name. Most often they have been told through the years that keywords in domain name is important.

To which I have always said, piffle. You can take any domain name and get it to rank for any expression. Just because you don’t have the keywords in the domain name doesn’t mean you cannot utilize the page URL to help with your query. Blogs do this every day. So do many news sites. So do a lot of static Web sites.

When you don’t have the option of embedding keywords in a domain name you can either hang your head and cry or you can step up to the plate and take a swing with a solid page URL that knocks a home run out of the park (or at least gives you a single). That’s a complex metaphor, by the way — please don’t try to calculate how important page URLs are to search indexing algorithms on the basis of a metaphor.

Here’s the thing: what you call your domain, in fact what you call your page doesn’t matter. I’ve seen URLs along the lines of izquikly.us/php?id=527 rank first for some pretty competitive queries. There was a time when people poo-pooed numbered page names but they have always worked just fine. What didn’t always work just fine was the SEO community’s common sense.

When you see irrelevantly named URLs ranking in search results, don’t assume it’s an anomaly. Assume there is a reason for the ranking. I could point you right now to a highly competitive commercial query where an empty Deutsch-language domain is ranked third. There is absolutely no content on the page shown in the search results. You can even click on the link and go see the empty page.

That’s an example of someone putting a blank page into a competitive query space with a LOT of link power. And why would they do that if they can neither sell anything nor redirect traffic from a blank page?

Because it’s the query that matters, not the domain or its content. Someone is expecting to make a lot of money off that domain for the simple reason it’s in someone else’s way. Call that economic blackmail or search results extortion. It’s been going on a long time, at least as far as search engine optimization is concerned.

There is no brand site associated with that particular query. In fact, I’ll stick my neck way out and predict there will never be a brand site associated with that query — not a brand site that uses the keywords in the domain name at any rate. There are some very well-funded companies manning the domains populating the search results for that query. They make millions of dollars every month on that query space (which is pretty large). You might even know the corporate brands, but their corporate sites don’t rank in that query space.

There is a huge wargame being played out on Google’s search results pages. There are several players involved in the game. They command immense resources and it means nothing to them to deploy a new site for the sole purpose of taking up one slot in the top ten results for a single query. You might call these doorway domains but I call them cash cows. They pull in traffic and conversions proportionate to their distance from the highly coveted number 1 position.

Except for the blank domain. That domain is sitting there at number 3 to prove a point. The point is that someone has the power to invade a highly competitive query space. Someone has the ability to shape the destiny of a query’s profitability. By denying the major players 1 out of 10 slots they don’t accomplish much, but what if they grab the other 9 — or just 4 more? What if the blank domain hits number 1?

You’d think a search engine worth the name would have sense enough to NOT allow a blank page to rank competitively — after all, they can crawl the site, see there is no content, and say to themselves, “Um — we should probably ignore all the links pointing to this blank page, at least until it has some content relevant to those links”.

Not that I would expect that to happen, but this is a game that goes beyond the quality of search results. This game has bigger stakes. The query itself can be burned out. Why should consumers continue searching for content with that query if all they get are blank pages? Imagine what life would be like if you could subtly nudge search traffic away from the queries that favor your competitors into the sub-query space that you dominate.

At this level of competition it’s not all about the links, it’s all about the query. Queries are fiefs. Query spaces are kingdoms. There may only be a king or there may be several princes fighting for the right to claim the kingship. The cutthroat tactics employed in this level of search optimization make average every day SEO look like a child’s game of tiddly winks.

There is much more that could be said on this topic. Don’t expect me to say much any time soon but think about what it means to build value in a query space. We all know what it takes to build value in a Web site. Sometimes it makes sense to build value in the query too. You don’t have to siphon off traffic from a highly competitive query by putting a blank domain in someone else’s way to do that.