Google’s update to Branded Site Links

Last month, in my Google’s Recent Updates: SEO Game Changers post I mentioned that Google now gave extra listings to site for their own brands.  I used Magnaflow.com as an example.  In this example, Magnaflow gets the first 4 listings.  The rest of the organic results consists of 6 listings, the first of which is Jegs.com.

Recently (August 16th to be exact) Google made a change to this.  Now, instead of extra search result listings, brands get site links underneath their homepage URL listing.  Following this, there are 9 organic listings, the first of which is Jegs.com.

I have noticed a definite change in search engine visits as a result of this change.  Based on data from numerous clients, this change leads to less visits to websites for their own branded terms, as more of those visits are now going to websites that rank just after the branded website.  This is certainly beneficial to those websites who now show up at the bottom of the first page of results and, under the old format, would have been pushed back to the 2nd page of results.

So in this scenario, Jegs.com would receive more visits from the term Magnaflow.

Of course, for the keyword Jegs,  the number of clicks on Jegs.com would drop as more would filter down to the listings below.

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