Why do big brands rank so well?

[agapitoflores001]

Good answer Matt. It really helps.

[estanuk]

ZZZzzz, Cutts, I'm sorry, but your full of shit. The answer is simple, for very competetive keywords the higest ranker is usually the person with the biggest budget.

Your always rambling on about quality content. Well what about sites that have static content that is specific to their business and offers no real informational value, yet they still rank very high for competetive keywords. It's because they have a massive SEO budget and can buy plenty of high quality links, end of story.

[carlyndolphin]

Some of the best SEO companies are those that rank highly themselves within Google's SERPS for the search terms seo, search engine optmisation and internet marketing. Companies like Just Search, Fresh Egg, Bigmouthmedia, SEO Consult and Greenlight etc. Obviously no SEO company can gurantee 1st page positions, but if they're on the first page they must be good. I've used 1 of these companies (I'm not saying which), otherwise it look like I work for them.

[KevinMontgomery]

Irregardless is not a word.

[g0ste]

yikes! the word "irregardless" was used. "hrmm... if i make the word longer, it will make me appear more cleverer."

[shakaama]

haha I'm stomping STOMPING all the competition. And, I'm just one guy, with a very crappy website [ doing redesign now] And they, I know for a fact, have teams of people doing SEO for them. When I outranked my greatest competition, I was a happy puppy.

Now sites like wikipedia, has crazy traffic, that's why they rank well. But you can take them down, with effort and skill. They are not always number 1, in fact I've seen them at 7 in some pages.

[playaboule]

Continue from prior Post. As we know this country is driven by small businesses of less than 50 employees. We create the greatest amount of tax revenue, employ overall the most people etc etc but don't get heard. As I said sadly Google seems unable to listen. Bottom line is that if you have the money you can afford to pay to have your staff create links, optimize keywords and learn how to manipulate their position. Hey, isn't that what lobbyists are paid to do!!

[playaboule]

This is sadly a cop out from Google. Its a lot like politics where when a politician is asked a simple but specific question and they deflect it. A question about something that is not working either in the public interest or expectation. The politician gives an evasiveness answer and/or answers with "but the other party doesn't do better.... " In this case "but the big guys complain the opposite"

[vxcriss]

Anyway, for everyone out there complaining about not being able to get on top search results, I would direct you to an other video of Matt where he says "too many people are too focused on search engine results... you also have to think about users", not showing up on the first pages on Google does not mean you can't do business, there is plenty of other means of driving quality traffic to your website besides search results, start with that and in time you will gain popularity and rank up.

[euJUICERScom]

Without sounding like Im complaining... I have to totally disagree. I am online with my shop now for over a year, have very good content, have natural backlinks and am specialized in one product group but even after 1 year, Im not able to get past page 10 with a certain key with countless irrelevant pages before me with no relevance to this particular key... needless to say not even close to the big names!

[vxcriss]

You have to remember that SEM is after all a link war. Whoever has the best links and in larger numbers, wins. No matter how advanced the Google bot is, from its point of view, some pages will pretty much have the same relevancy to a search, and whoever is shown first is determined solely by whoever has better links. And, obviously, big brands always have the most and the best links cause they are popular, and also have a lot of money and work hours put into e-marketing.

[CisMediaGuy]

Thanks for saying absolutely nothing. That was some impressive stuff there

[flashmind1]

Matt I am a big fan of the videos you have produced, and I believe it is awesome Google is open about questions, but I must disagree with the answer on this one as well. Small Businesses stood a chance before big businesses optimized websites and so on. Now it is an uphill battle to get make it some where as a small business owner on the internet.

[Rahulixigo]

Usually we find in "most" of the cases that big brands without any content/relevance rank well. Travel websites (Brands) can be best example!

[cpotts73]

Hey people of the world! IRREGARDLESS is NOT a word!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Recognize this!

[igmalfuentes]

Yes it is.

[markn26]

Big brands have 2 huge advantages: 1) using their already known brand name to leverage more links on all corners of the web, and 2) the capital to spend 5-6 figures on hiring companies for a backlink campaign, which is why they appear for high visibility keywords. It's unfortunate to see how backlinks are still such a major factor in ranking.

[vxcriss]

If you would be God, and you would be able to instantly visualize all the web pages on the Internet that contain information related to a search phrase, you will probably find thousands of pages with exactly the same information on them, but in different wording. How would you determine which ones deserve to be listed in the first 10? Throw a coin? Relevancy only works to a certain point, between the relevant pages, there has to be a competition to determine the winner. Meet the back links.

[bullisticsguy]

mrdavidsinger100 hitit right on the head! fellow brothers, least we forget the magic of true, clean website back links? These "big brand" companies have tons of outsourcers hired and all they do is list in website directories and article directories all around the world. (ok matt ill cutt it out, lol) As long as it dont comprimize any Google standards, Matt here and his team love it! Go true white hatters! sad that yes, some are big brand company's with big brand money!

[HillWilliam420]

I do Not Agree..... Search "Playstation Pro". What comes up but a sports store? has not one thing to do with playstation but it gets #1. There is a problem.

[mrdavidsinger100]

The biggest reason that in most cases Big Brands are showing up in the higher rankings is that they tend to send out press releases at a rate of +/- 4 a month. The press get these and post them with links to the brand name sites. No matter how hard mom and pop stores work, they will not have this power of incoming links that brand name sites do.

[s0crates9]

I have to say that I don't agree matt. Yes, rarely a more relevant page shows up instead of a brand but in my experience they have much more leverage regardless of the actual value from the page result.

[tsrand0m]

Of late, Many of the brands with good reputation with the search engines have added social bookmarking to their site; safe bet for spammers and MFA sites to stuff junk on the SERPs.

unfortunately, these big brands are doing nothing about it, maybe they added the bookmarking feature to exploit the algorithms in the first place and they are very much succeeding in it.

[plabrow]

Sorry, Tombo100 this is a good question - I often have brands asking why they don't rank well and the reason is always definable, but they struggle to understand it if they are number one off line. And there may be people watching who don't have your expertise/knowledge and will benefit from the answer.

[incrediblehelp]

"Why do big brands rank so well?"

So you did not answer the question other to say we rank the pages we feel are best 1-2-3-4 etc.

[MattCutts]

incrediblehelp, the question got votes, but I wanted to explain why I didn't agree with the question. Big brands *don't* rank well regardless of relevance.

[BIGELLOW]

irregardless [sic]

[tombo100]

Seriously, I look forward to your videos Matt but this was pure drivel. You remind me of the newspapers saying we have letters saying that we are too conservative or too liberal so we must be in the right place. The kooks will write no matter what.

This one should have stayed in the can...

[MattCutts]

You may not agree with every answer I do, but I wanted to address the question. I don't agree that big sites always do well "irregardless of relevance."

[emmetor]

@MattCutts Matt, you seem like a good guy, and I admit to the odd scathing reply to some of your info provided, I hope you don't take it personally, but i have to call you on this one.

I've analysed site traffic, and rankings for certain keywords, and I have discovered to my surprise, that my rankings have gone quite a bit up since 2006. Thing is, my site has been dead for years.

And that's the point. Practically all the Mom and Pops are dead. Over-reliance of PR killed them.

[alejandroangelico]

Matt, estaba esperando que dieras algún tip, o que comentaras alguna buena estrategia, no que dijeras "pobre de nosotros, todo el mundo nos maltrata..."

Matt, I expected some kind of tip or comment about any stragegy, not the "poor little google, everybody is rude with us..."