This debate was first kicked off by Aaron Wall and has been floating around in webamaster forums for a while now. The debate still lingers on with no absolute answer.
In response to this question, Matt Cutts, Google spokesman says…
“Inside of Google, we don’t really think about brands, we think about words such as trust, authority, reputation, pagerank, high quality.”
“If somebody comes to google and types X we want to return high quality information about X. Sometimes that’s a brand search sometimes that’s an informational search somethimes its navigational sometimes it’s transactional.”
“Yes Google has made a change in our rankings. It’s one of 3(00) or 400 changes we make every year. I wouldn’t call this an update, I would call it just a simple change. We refere to it as the Vince change (the person who’s working on it within the Googleplex.”
Watch the Matt Cutts clip for more on Google’s official position about favouring Brands in the natural search results…
