Comment on Brand Marketing Strategy by Mike.

Brand Marketing Strategy Hi David,

In my experience penalties are usually much more granular and don’t affect brand searches. For brand to be penalised you’d be looking at a very severe penalty which has resulted in the site being deindexed, these are reserved for those sites who are using extreme blackhat methods, sites that continue to spam links after receiving manual penalties or for when Google wants to send a strong message by making an example of someone such as we’ve seen recently with MBG to scare people away from guest blogging and previously with Interflora to send a message about followed links in advertorials.

In general when you have a keyword level penalty you will still rank for the branded version of that search, it’s only the generic that suffers. The same is true for broader algorithmic penalties that affect generics across the board.

Also it’s worth noting that loss of organic visibility is often nothing to do with penalty but instead related to technical on-site issues, so long as the site isn’t blocking bots then it should still rank for brand terms even when generics suffer.

From reading your last sentence I think we are on the same page here but the difference is perhaps in our outlook. You still seem to think that I was suggesting that SEO should be a vehicle for brand and that SEO resources should be diverted into brand. What I’m actually saying is that growing the brand benefits SEO but that brand growth can only be achieved in a wider marketing mix across all channels.

How you go about that mix is really down to the type of business that you are.

I understand that you have adsense revenue trickling in from a large network of blogs that you own and that all these trickles will add up to decent stream of income for you so perhaps brand is not so important to you as you have this income to rely on and you need to spend time and resources on maintaining these blogs.

However my advice was not originally aimed at you or your situation, the OP on Linkedin was concerned about her business and as far as I’m aware she is in a very different situation as she relies on generic traffic for one site. So loss of visibility is pretty damaging for her business if she relies solely on organic non brand traffic.

On a side note I can’t see your preferred landing page for your theme ranking for your target keywords but instead your plugin page is ranking for these terms.

Anyway I think we’re going round in circles here so maybe we just have to agree to disagree on this one.

All the best,

Mike