I do a lot of personal SEO work in the travel space, and something I noticed made me question how Google will determine what constitutes a branded search. I did a search on Google for "Colorado National Monument" - I have a video that I created and I was checking to see how it was doing visibility wise.....what I saw was that the National Park Service's website, nps.gov, was being considered by Google as the "brand" for the search, and it was displaying sitelinks for the Colorado National Monument section within the nps.gov website. Now is the colorado national monument a branded search? Hardly........slippery slope here. All of the traditional travel websites, like tripadvisor, travel.yahoo, etc., were well below all of these sitelinks.

Link is busted Jill.

Yeah, I mean why would anyone go to Google and type in "search engine" to look for another search engine to perform a query? I can see why they could give a rats a$$.

You are sharp Jill. However, I still found the comment to be humurous and a subtle (perhaps deliberate or not) shot at the community who still poke their heads in.

I do feel however, after taking a look at Alan's Twitter account and the comments he made regarding a very general comment by another, that they were a bit "over-the-top." If these are the types of things that get people fired up and angry these days to the point they feel it is necessary to resort to blasting out personal name-calling, it just makes me wonder.

"Whilst I've not taken any interest in the content here in a while." Excuse us peons, Ms Copeland.

I'm not an English major by any means but I think there is something to be said regarding Brenda's "excessive" usage of the exclamation point! Every sentence in her replies uses it! Does every sentence truly need to be emphasized?! Curious!

Looks a little like Bing methinks?

Nothing really new in the article...I think the myth's thing has been done to death, no? Though, since they still continue to permeate unknowing SEO's minds it's still necessary to educate I suppose.

One other thing unrelated to the article, I'm curious as to why it's necessary for people to sign off after leaving a comment........doesn't your avatar and username kind of already establish who is doing the talking? BeantownSEO

Wow, a lot of needless hostility here methinks.

I have to slightly disagree with @ogletree. While those links may somewhat be "blinded," kind of in the same way that most people don't click on the top paid listings and look directly at the top of the organic listings, I do think that eventually people may catch on to this new feature and look at those brands as synonomous as the general terms they search for and thus go directly to those.

However if the big brand is already ranking well for that head term then I would agree that it likely won't affect much unless their competitors weren't very visible and are now benefitting from this. I think it's going to have some affect, eventually.

I agree with Jill that on observations alone Google seemingly passes nearly 100% of the original. I've also had similar results with Yahoo and Bing taking an exorbitant amount of time to notice new URL's and index them, replacing the older versions. In my experience I'd estimate weeks if not months.

There is a bit of irony in the fact that @stcsurabaya is asking how to reduce big page size while the home page of his site offers training in web development and design......Ooops.

I wonder how those who have adamantly professed for years that well formed markup / clean code has no effect on SEO, like Jill Whalen, will respond to this?

I agree with Shockley regarding "put more effort behind finding a way to redirect a non-www to the www version (or vice versa" but Jill's comment is just plain wrong and bad advice. You said it yourself Jill that "in most cases you've checked these days, Google already knows that the www version is the same as the non-www one" which certainly is not a definitive statement or else you would have said in all cases.

Saying "in all cases" would be false because I am currently working with a major retail brand who came to us with their entire website indexed in Google under the www version (which was the preferred) and the non-www version due to faulty redirects, and the different versions were ranking for targeted keyphrases. To say it's no longer necessary to check, at least at the very outset of a campaign, is misleading and misguided advice to be providing in such a forum.

Yes - very strange that the original article from SEL has received fewER sphinns than this ONE.

Surprising that this has not received more Sphinns. Does the avatar really make that much of a difference?.......this really is a terrific article, a shame.

Hmm not quite sure how the quotes make the article difficult to read...they are just quotes after-all. Good read I say - soup to nuts stuff.

“Take a website, give it huge ugly parameter filled urls, don’t include META keywords or description, make all links images, don’t put H1 tags or bold text or anything, and don’t give it a sitemap. It’s going to rank pretty poorly unless it somehow obtains tons of links.”

I dont think one can make the assumption that because all of these things aren't being done, that the site will rank poorly. I think you could not do any of those things, as Jill has said, and the site could rank well just fine. However, you may improve a few things mentioned in there, and could give the site a teeny boost. Even the teeniest boosts, which Jill herself said in the article, is possible, and as many people in the industry would surely agree, the teeniest of boosts, when aggregated, can make an impact and a difference.

There are a lot of arguments to be made here, but I think it all comes down to understanding what one should invest time in, and what is just going to be a waste.

In terms of H1'S, I think I would agree that the fact that the tag itself is an H1 holds no relevance - the simple fact that keywords are on the page is what is significant and if they are able to be placed in your headlines, than you shoud do so.....again not because of the tag itself holding any significance, but the fact that readers will instantly see your headlines (presumingly) and it is important for understanding information hierarchy and semantics, and the search engines will see keywords on the page. When looking at it that way, it makes sense.

I too wouldn't recommend changing URL's that are working perfectly fine for the sake of changing them to include keywords, but if you are planning a change or redesign, that is something that would make sense, if possible.

I also do not think XML Sitemaps are useless. If your site architecture is in good shape, then yes, I don't think it's critical, but in many cases I have seen evidence of XML Sitemaps helping a site in terms of the crawling of URL's by search engines.