How Google distinguish and ignore keyword attested with or in a brand?
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Hi community,
Generally there will be a primary keyword which everybody concentrates and expect their homepage or website to rank for....like "seo" for seo consulting or seo tools. There might be some companies with this keyword in their brand name like "ABC SEO". So this primary keyword will be all over the website being part of the brand name; especially in page titles and header tags. How Google distinguish and ignores this keyword in brand name to avoid giving more ranking boost to such websites? Will this keyword will be completely ignored being the part of the company name or their domain name? How Google distinguish between a generic keyword and keyword in company name?
Thanks
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I wrote this answer to a slightly similar question in 2016, on Quora - and IMO nothing has changed much in this area:
Google is not very good at distinguishing and ignoring, or thinking about brands specifically. Actually Google sees query-spaces in terms of 'search entities' (especially after the Hummingbird update). Different keywords and keyphrases are related to one another and where that definition is pretty clear cut (thematically) you have a search entity. A search entity can exist in multiple different states (place, business, news topic, trending search, regular query space for general interest - etc.)
When most of the searches (or search queries / keywords) within a given search entity change in terms of the user's intent, the search entity itself may shift state. If a search entity which previously handled generic 'interest' based queries is intercepted by something like a meme (and suddenly there are an explosion of searches, with clicks going to sites with radically different thematic groundings) - then the state of the search entity and its associated keywords (or most of them) can shift from one contextual niche to a completely different one
If you think of it like that, things become much clearer. It's not that Google is saying "hey you're a brand you're cheating I'm kicking you out". Instead Google is saying "well I know that this search entity is not a business or brand, most people are searching for a meme that is trending. As such I'll return sites which more closely match the state of the search entity to which this query-space is bound"
Not all search entities are so clear cut. Some query-spaces are very ambiguous! In which case, Google will try to return a balanced mixture of results. "SEO" is actually a very good example as, many people are searching for information but many people are also searching for companies and businesses. As such Google supplies divided results and tries to give the best of both (or all) thematic pillars. These are what we call noisy query-spaces:
- https://d.pr/i/UX3lON.png (screenshot)
I know it's not a very clear-cut answer, but search is diverse and complex :')
Hope that helps
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