

Are Google Brand Links making it tougher for your online business to compete? - shandsaker
http://centuryhouse.net/google-just-killed-your-online-business/

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vaksel
Google has been tweaking search for a while now. From what I've seen, their
goal with all these brand links/shopping links etc is to make people buy
adwords to show up in results.

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ghergich
[http://www.authoritydomains.com/blogs/seo/4-ways-to-use-
goog...](http://www.authoritydomains.com/blogs/seo/4-ways-to-use-google-brand-
links-to-your-advantage.php)

I think you can turn this around and actually get traffic from it. Just posted
a blog about it.

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Qz
I didn't even see the brand links at first, not sure how they're going to kill
a business.

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chaosmachine
Yuck. More proof that Google gives "brand name" businesses an unfair
advantage.

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jackowayed
Google's goal is to get people to the most useful page for what they're
looking for. There's a good chance that what they really want is the website
of a brand they've heard of, so it makes sense that Google would want to put
those brands at the top.

Sure, it's kind of an unfair advantage, but so is the fact that people have
heard of Victoria's Secret and not Freshpair. But you can't fault Google for
trying to make their search better at sending people to the site they're
looking for.

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briansmith
Google's goal is to make itself as much money as possible. If Google thought
that result was the best one for the user, it would rank it #1 in the SERPs.
You can see over the last few years that they are increasingly putting
profitable (for Google) links in front of the most relevant results. And, when
they can't find anything profitable to put in front of the top link, they try
to find other ways to avoid you clicking through--e.g. "search within this
site."

