By 5 years ago in SEO  How user data, links & document scoring
may be used in the “brand” algorithm  Ever since the brand
update hit the UK last month thousands of people have been
trying to analyse exactly what signals Google is using to give
certain sites a boost in authority & rankings. A lot of people
have even been looking at this data since the changes were first
noticed in January on but nobody really seems to have found the
answer.  There are many SEO companies claiming credit for their
large brand clients jumping from obscurity to a top 5 ranking
for a big generic keyword, saying that they predicted the change
and have been actively optimising towards it for months. Ask
them exactly what they have been doing and you won’t get a
straightforward answer.  We can guess at a lot of the signals
but a lot of the sites ranking for major terms seems to be doing
so for absolutely no reason at all. Some of the pages don’t even
have any of the target keywords in the title tag and others have
zero inbound links.