Are Brand Mentions Important to Google's Algorithm? - Search Engine Journal

Google's John Mueller answers if brand mentions are important to Google's algorithm

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Google’s John Mueller was asked if “unlinked brand mentions” were important in Google’s algorithm. It was apparent from John’s response that “brand mentions” is probably not a real thing in Google’s algorithm, but he also said that there may be value to site visitors who encounter them.

Brand Mentions

There is a longstanding idea in the SEO community that Google uses mentions of a website as a form of link.

One version of the idea is that if someone publishes a URL like this, https://www.example.com but without making it a link, that Google probably counts it as a link. This is the unlinked URL idea, that a published URL can be used as a link by Google.

The unlinked URL idea subsequently evolved into the idea that if a website mentions another site’s brand name, that Google will also count that as a link. This is the “brand mentions” idea.

But there was never any evidence of that until around 2012 when Google published a patent called Ranking Search Results.

The patent was several pages long and buried deep in the middle of it was the mention of an “implied link” being used as a type of link, which was different from an “express link” which is described as a traditional hyperlink.

The phrase “implied links” only...

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