Now, I must say the way this is written about in the documentation is quite arcane. There’s a lot of sort of Google-specific jargon and terminology, a lot of links to other documents that we don’t have access to, so we can’t really see the context. But what it seems to me is that Google is interested in the link to branded search volume ratio of some sites, and that this is part of how Panda worked or works. So, let me just explain how that might work.

So if you have a site which has got a lot of links, but no one is actually searching for that specific site, Google might call it navigational search, no people are looking for that specific site, so say for example, tcapper.co.uk, my personal site, spoiler, it doesn’t get a huge amount of traffic, if nobody is looking for tcapper.co.uk, but I have millions of links, that is a bit suspect, right? Something is wrong here. So, that ratio would suggest a problem.

The documentation makes it seem like that’s somehow related to or some component of how Panda works. It also alludes to something called Baby Panda, which Mike King has suggested could be the helpful content update or a related system. Actually, this makes sense.

So again, in that last Whiteboard Friday I did about the March updates, I theorized that brand would be a good way of handling some of the problems that Google currently faces, some of the crises it currently faces. Anecdotally, a lot of the sites that you see being hit by helpful content updates, they perhaps do have a slightly smaller brand than one might expect for their traffic level.

That’s extremely anecdotal. There are exceptions. But this is interesting. It kind of lines up with a lot of experiences, but I don’t think anyone suspected such a crude metric here. So we’ll dig into this more as time goes on. But yeah, some food for thought there.